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The ROI of Constant Innovation
Think of the world of business as a treadmill that’s operating at high speed. If you stand still, you will be flung off!

Innovation is how you stay on the treadmill. It’s the way to keep moving to survive and thrive in today’s competitive environment.

Turbulent business times require companies to innovate constantly to maintain their edge in the market. The direction of many business organizations’ thinking is leaning towards the concept of transient competitive advantage. This concept says that a business needs to continuously innovate to stay afloat in the market.

However, there is a catch here…

Innovation always entails certain risks. Well, that’s to be expected, isn’t it? After all, innovation involves betting on something that’s hitherto untried and untested…

But, what do you need to consider before plunging into innovation?

Can you afford to invest in innovation? Where will the money come from? What can constant innovation cost your company? Who will manage it?

Often, investment in innovation comes out of funds that would otherwise go into the company reserves strengthening the organization or be distributed as profits/dividends thereby making investors happy. Investing in innovation has an opportunity cost that needs to be quantified to see what ROI justifies the investment. However, not all aspects of this decision can be quantified.

You should invest in exploring innovative ideas only if you can provide the necessary resources and hold out until your idea turns profitable. There is no point in kicking off ambitious innovative projects only to slacken the pace midway due to financial constraints. All business ventures, especially innovative concepts have a gestation period. It takes considerable time to:
- Educate your audience about the features
- Convince them that the product works and delivers what it promises
- Penetrate the market and get sales going
There are also other important factors that affect the success of an innovative business venture:
- Market conditions – how conducive are current market conditions to make space for an innovative product like yours?
- Latent need in the market for such a product – do you sense a strong need in the market for your innovation?
- Can you consistently own a lion’s share of the market for your innovation?
- Premium: It’s likely that you are going to find others copying your innovation and maybe even improving on it in the months to come. Can you charge a premium for the innovation while you are still the first in the market so that you can quickly recoup some of the investment made in the innovation?
- Competitors’ position – Often innovation is a tool to create a buzz and a favorable image. It’s worth thinking about how your innovation will affect competition and use market intelligence to understand if your competitors are working on something similar that can counter or nullify your innovation.
- Your marketing strategy – how aggressive and sensitive is your marketing strategy? Is it inclusive of all the above factors?
Funding Innovation

Investing in an innovative idea is often worth its while. Creating a separate fund out of your profits, for exploring and supporting innovative ideas is a great way to ensure continued investment in innovation. If you do this, you wouldn’t need to dip into your profits every time someone in your organization comes up with an idea worth checking out. You can just use your ‘innovation fund’.

The Innovation Manager

An important factor that you need to consider is the employee in charge of innovation. The best person to manage innovation is someone interested in trying out new ideas and one who is not demotivated by the losses to the division that are inevitable till profits start rolling in.

Ideally, whoever is handling innovation should be remunerated so that he doesn’t pay the price for the long gestation yet is incentivized if the innovation is successful. Willingness to invest resources and absorb losses is imperative for success in innovation.

Let’s take a look at two examples of innovative products and their later modifications:
- The Apple iPhone was a revolutionary innovation. However, the later versions of the iPhone are not innovations in themselves. They are extensions of the original innovation, the iPhone.
- Another example is the luggage case, which was the innovation idea. The trolleys that are so common today are a modification of this innovative idea.
What is your opinion about innovation? Are there any other steps a business can take to ensure continued exploration of innovative ideas?

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August 6, 2014
Pinterest Builds on Content Curation with Icebergs Acquisition

Pinterest is strengthening its content curation abilities with its latest acquisition, Barcelona-based startup Icebergs.

Icebergs is a company that provides a private online space for users to find, organize and collaborate on projects in the form of images, videos and other types of digital content.

Icebergs’ two co-founders, César Isern and Albert Pereta will join Pinterest’s team in San Francisco. Icebergs’ online service will be shut down and its current users will be asked to migrate their projects by September 1, 2014.

Though Pinterest is not adding Icebergs’ technology to its platform, this acquisition will add more users to Pinterest’s user base and help Pinterest in improving its content curation offering. Pinterest will be relying on Icebergs co-founders to build technology for the discovery and organization of content on the site.

Known for its appealing visual content and content curation possibilities, this talent acquisition can help Pinterest in becoming a better content curation platform for marketers. Marketers will then be able to conceptualize and launch great creative projects in richer formats like videos on Pinterest. With more content curation, marketers can collate content from their fans, which effectively ensures that they are using content people are actually interested in.

Until now, Pinterest was a curation point mostly for images, which can change with the acquisition of Icebergs. Marketers can aim for higher engagement rates with more relevant and interesting content if Pinterest applies Icebergs’ co-founders on a path to bolster its content curation abilities.

Image Source

August 4, 2014

Geo-targeting, B2B content marketing and much more…| Best of the Week

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

From the Position² Blog This Week:

Geo-targeting – 7 Tips to Consider

User targeting is becoming more precise and its importance is increasing in the digital marketing world. Precise and relevant user targeting is essential to ensure better campaign success and geo-targeting is one way of doing it. Read this blog to know more about geo-targeting.

Best of the Week Video
Check out this video where John Rampton talks to Bob Rains about negative SEO practices prevalent in the industry and how to stop such practices.

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

Know more about Enterprise Visibilty Accelerator(EVA)

If you are reading this blog post via a RSS reader, please click here to subscribe.

August 1, 2014

LinkedIn to Launch New Sales Tool

Arguably one of the most reputed professional networking sites, LinkedIn, is aiming to befriend sales executives.

LinkedIn is going to start offering a new tool this week, Sales Navigator, which it says will make the lives of sales people easier and happier.

Costing $1200 per year, Sales Navigator allows sales people to efficiently look up potential customers who would be more inclined to meet due to shared personal connections. LinkedIn has tested this tool with companies like PayPal and Autodesk and claims to have gained good results.

LinkedIn says that sales people can turn out better results and be more productive since Sales Navigator lets them contact prospects through known people. Sales Navigator allows you to import existing contacts from Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics. Using this imported data, LinkedIn can bring up more information about those contacts. With the ability to draw more information about contacts imported from other tools like Salesforce, sales people can improve their productivity for prospects arising from platforms other than LinkedIn also

LinkedIn can also scan contacts’ social data for additional insights that will tell you if people are warm prospects or cold calls. Insight into contacts’ social behavior can enrich and make sales executives’ approach more relevant when contacting prospects.

LinkedIn will also allow whole companies to pool their sales executives’ connections. This can help sales people to connect with a prospect through another sales person’s connections even if they don’t know the prospect personally.

However, LinkedIn is also conscious of the effect this feature can have on users. To prevent people from being deluged by mails from sales people, LinkedIn is restricting Sales Navigator users to only 25 targeted InMails every month.

Check out these screenshots of the Sales Navigator tool:

Image source: Mashable

Do you think LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator will benefit sales executives? And, will it be accepted well by users?

August 1, 2014
Geo-targeting – 7 Tips to Consider

It’s a common scenario today for brands to have customers in many countries. But, targeting these customers and engaging them is a challenge, owing to their varying preferences and requirements.

This is where geo-targeting steps in…

Targeting customers by location is called Geo-targeting. It’s an important aspect of online marketing especially for brands targeting customers in different geographical locations.

Geo-targeting helps brands address customers using their preferred language and target them with region-specific offers. This increases customers’ brand affinity, engagement and conversions. Google AdWords provides a variety of options and features for geo-targeting.

However, there are certain important factors you need to consider while planning geo-targeting campaigns:

1. Your site’s domain

Some brands have Top Level Domains (TLD) specific to the country they want to provide information for. A ‘.co.uk’ site is specific to the UK and ‘.co.jp’ is specific to Japan. Country specific TLDs make it easy for Google to understand who you are targeting with your information and lets it rank your website appropriately in location specific search results.

However, with a generic TLD like .com or .org, your website may not appear correctly in search results because Google doesn’t know which location you are targeting. If no information has been entered in the Webmaster tools, Google will look at multiple signals like the IP address, location information on your page, links to your page and any other relevant information from Google Places and pick your website’s country domain. These may not yield you the best results. With generic TLDs, it’s best to give Google the requisite information to improve search ranking for specific locations.

2. Choose the right geographical areas

This sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s surprising how often this is missed. Select geographical areas for your campaigns based on your product availability. If your product is available in certain regions of a country, picking those areas will increase the chances of better ad ROI. With Google AdWords, you can achieve precision targeting by postal code targeting.

3. Optimize By Exclusion

Optimize your effectiveness by leaving out areas that are delivering low responses. You can get back to these areas with a revised strategy. After the first run of your campaign, you may notice that your ads have low ROI in certain areas or your products may not have a market in some regions due to geographical factors. You can optimize your ROI by cutting out non-performing areas. Concentrate more on the areas that are generating the highest number of clicks. You can also try bidding less on the areas that have low traction.

4. Include mobile devices

If most of your target audience is on their mobile devices for considerable amounts of time, you should geo-target your mobile audience also. If you are using Google AdWords call extensions and tracing a significant part of your conversions through calls, geo-targeting on mobile devices will be even more beneficial for your business.

People use mobile devices when they are on the go and would be looking for deals that are nearby. Geo-targeting mobile users is highly beneficial because, you can then target them with not only offers in establishments they are close to, you can also roll out geo-specific offers.

5. Use the appropriate languages and currency

Matching your web pages’ language with the main languages of the region is a major aspect of geo targeting that influences traffic and engagement. Provide content in different languages and use a drop down menu that allows users to select the language/region they are accessing the site from. This is an effective way to ensure users can consume content easily. Another way to make your site easy to use is to build it so that it reads the user’s IP address and displays content in the main language of that region.

You also need to focus on the currencies that your site uses to process transactions. Offer the right currency depending on the geographical area the user is browsing from. You can also offer currency options and leave the choice up to customers.

6. Offer coupons and deals

The marketing strategy for each market is different. So, it’s important to sync your offers and deals with the visitor’s geographical area. You can either track users’ IP addresses or you can provide menus for users to select from before providing region-wise offers. Localized offers and deals are more relevant to visitors as they cater to specific market requirements and can therefore help in driving conversions.

7. Run tests

Everything may not go as planned so it’s best to run tests to see if your effectiveness is indeed going up or whether you need to tweak any part of your strategy. Different people react differently to changes, even minor ones and it’s best to use this as an opportunity to improvise further.

Do you have anything to add to this? Let us know in your comments!

July 30, 2014
Why B2B Companies Shouldn’t Skip Video Marketing [Infographic]

Video is emerging as a major crucial tool for B2B marketers. Whether it is for engagement or brand awareness, marketers are adding videos as a tool in their marketing arsenal. Check out this visual representation of the world of video marketing for B2B.

July 29, 2014
LinkedIn acquires Bizo and Launches Direct Sponsored Content

LinkedIn & Bizo

LinkedIn has acquired B2B ad tech company Bizo in a deal costing approximately $175 million.

This acquisition comes after Facebook bought LiveRail and Twitter purchased TapCommerce recently. These moves by social networks are aimed at bolstering their ad reach beyond the boundaries of their websites.

Bizo enables B2B marketers to post ads to professional target audiences across the web. Bizo is integrated with marketing automation platforms and also has a database that will help marketers target by company, industry and functional area parameters. Bizo helps marketers nurture prospects at every stage of the buying funnel through targeted content and supports precise and measurable multi-channel marketing programs.

Bizo’s targeting capabilities coupled with LinkedIn’s large professional network can help B2B marketers improve performance of multi-channel campaigns.

LinkedIn Direct Sponsored Content (DSC)

LinkedIn’s acquisition of Bizo was closely followed by the launch of a new feature, Direct Sponsored Content (DSC), which will help marketers reach out to specific audiences with more personalized content.

DSC is an extension of LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates. DSC enables marketers to publish sponsored content to their LinkedIn homepage feed without posting it on the Company Page. DSC can be viewed by page administrators on the Company Page but it will show only for those users who fit the target criteria specified for the campaign. The launch of DSC will allow marketers to target and engage with the right members of the target audience using more personalized content.

Earlier, with Sponsored Updates, marketers had to post content to their Company Page. If they wanted to test an ad, they had to repeatedly post ads on the Company Page to measure the audience’s reaction. It was very likely that users would get irked by this. Marketers collected a mix of organic and paid results and could not measure the performance of posts accurately.

DSC now allows marketers to optimize content according to the preferences of specific consumers and conduct A/B tests across audience segments.

Will LinkedIn’s acquisition of Bizo achieve the desired results? Can Direct Sponsored Content (DSC) contribute to LinkedIn targeting and personalization capabilities?

Image Source: Bizo

July 25, 2014

SEO features for ecommerce sites, tracking intent data for B2B marketers and much more…| Best of the Week

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

From the Position² Blog This Week:

The ‘must have’ SEO features for an ecommerce site
SEO strategy for ecommerce sites is different. They need to draw from retail marketing while also conforming to search engine algorithm trends. Check out this article to know about the SEO features for ecommerce sites.

Best of the Week Video
Watch this video where Hugh talks about the different tactics used by B2B marketers and the effects they have on closure rates at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

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

If you are reading this blog post via a RSS reader, please click here to subscribe.

July 25, 2014

The ‘must have’ SEO features for an ecommerce site
ECommerce/online shopping is the trend of the day. It will continue to grow and is expected to outrun ‘normal shopping’. At this pace, product companies need to prepare to compete with seasoned players in the market.

Organic search space is dominated by the Amazons and Walmarts of the world. There are of course, several factors which contribute to this, like the number of pages, the number of visitors, the brand equation and the online spends of these companies.

Given these, what should a normal player in the ecommerce space be doing to ensure that his website lists at the top of SERPs?

Optimizing e-commerce websites is not an easy task. Strategies for ecommerce SEO need to be based on retail marketing and should also be in sync with recent search algorithm trends. From an SEO perspective, here’s what should be looked at for e-commerce sites:

1. Keyword Selection

Keyword research for any ecommerce site should be based on thorough market research and industry competition. Search engines, with their updated algorithms, intend to deliver best possible results to the user. So, understanding consumer search behavior is important.

Consumer specific, long tail and geo-specific keywords should not be ignored.

2. User Experience and Website Loading Time

With growing competition in the online space, user experience becomes an important consideration. Sites need to provide the ‘shopping’ experience for users. Better user experience and engagement ratio on the website receive rewards and recognition from search engines.

Smart search algorithms now focus on ranking websites based on the above factors and other metrics like page load time.

3. Website Structure and On-page Factors

The structure of the website needs to be in line with search engine guidelines. The content should be written primarily for users.

Other on-page factors include:
- URLs
  - Keep URLs short and simple
  - Include keywords and use hyphens as separators
  - Avoid query strings
- Unique meta data
  - Have niche page title and descriptions
  - Avoid duplicate content
  - Focus on improving CTAs by using compelling descriptions
- Navigation with breadcrumbs
  - Maintain consistent structure for navigation
  - Provide links to category and product pages
  - Use breadcrumbs efficiently
- Category and product pages
  - Optimize product pages for long tail keywords
  - Embed videos
  - Post images which have high resolution (for example, product images on Amazon)
  - Encourage user reviews
Image Source: Amazon.com
- Schema markup (rich snippets, structured data, microdata)
  - Leverage schema for products and breadcrumbs
  - Add schema markup for product reviews, improve trust and gain better CTA
Search Query: Barnes and Noble Coupons

4. Mobile Optimization

Google recommends using responsive web design.
- Optimize for mobile queries (mobile and desktop users don’t search alike)
- Have compressed images for faster rendering
- Keep it local
- Give importance to CTAs and store locators
Image Source: Google Developers

5. Social Integration
- Have social plug-ins on category and product pages
- Allow users to login through social profiles (social sign in)
- Make user reviews/comments on social channels visible on the website
- Share user-generated content
Image Source: Apple Store

While the above are tips for boosting organic traffic to an e-commerce site, the real strength lies in the quality and service of the products offered. A great customer journey on site followed by great customer service reaps rich dividends!

Happy Shopping!

Do you have anything to add to this blog? Post your comments in the box below!

Contributed by Chetan Rajasekaraiah, Senior SEO Specialist, SEO team
July 23, 2014
New Patent Enables Marketers to Tie Sales to Specific TV Ads

AOL’s Adap.tv’s new patent allows it to tie consumer sales to specific television advertisements. This helps marketers to connect conversions with television advertising better.

The new patent involves a system which can recognize conversions stemming from television and based on the study of those patterns, can predict the possibility of future conversions. For companies, activating this online conversion attribution capability is as simple as adding conversion tracking script on their websites.

Sales will be measured against audiences who have been exposed to your ads and those who haven’t been. This system measures the total change among those groups and provides capabilities for real-time analytics. Being able to access real-time analytics is a huge plus compared to the earlier scenario where this data was available once in a quarter or a year.

Using this technology, marketers can understand the capability of their TV or digital advertising in driving sales. It also helps marketers to have a more complete view of the performance of their marketing campaigns across channels. Marketers can track conversions to a specific ad and also to a particular airing time. This will be a lot of help for marketers during budget allocation for television and optimizing effective ads.

Inability to trace conversions to their TV ad campaigns has long been a pain point for marketers. Such capabilities are steps towards addressing this concern as well as bringing together TV and online advertising.

What do you think about this analytical capability? Let us know in your comments…

Image source

July 21, 2014