Weekend Favs April 29

Weekend Favs April 29 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

• PeakFeed – PeakFeed makes it easy to monitor your brand’s social media efforts by automatically sending you a weekly email with stats from all of your accounts.
• And Co – From proposal to payment: A proactive app to give you more time to do what you love – your work.
• Token – Your personal gifting assistant, always ready to help you send something that shows exactly how you feel.

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

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Marketing Automation Rocks But Let’s Not Forget the Human Elements

Marketing automation has been a game changer in terms of the time, money, and human error savings. It’s allowed us to learn more, do more, react faster, and target more effectively. Adding a machine element to just about anything over the past few centuries, harkening back to the Industrial Revolution, has proven to be an improvement across all industries. And, with the movement toward machine learning and artificial intelligence adding another dimension to marketing automation, there’s even more possible.

Where Machines Miss the Mark

While this is really cool, we can’t forget why marketing is actually science and art -- and how art is something that requires the human element. That’s because, while a computer works with numbers and code, it doesn’t quite get the nuances attached to human emotions that are integral to creating an emotional connection through marketing techniques.

Marketing automation essentially supplies the data that helps a marketer create the strategy, tactics, and content that can achieve the company’s initiatives and financial objectives. Unfortunately, marketing teams and content freelancers everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief because even the best AI software cannot establish a strategy or create content like a human or in a way that customers and prospects would believe it was personable. Plus, a computer has yet to learn the fine art of persuasion – the heart of marketing – that only a human can deliver.

Making the Best of Both Worlds

With the idea that marketing has become a team effort between machines and humans, you can leverage both to deliver an enhanced marketing effort:

• Assess the data from your marketing automation software to identify a key objective, need, and message for your marketing campaigns. The data will tell you the problem you need to solve for your audience and illustrate their behavior while searching for their answer. This machine-generated intelligence serves as the basis for your marketing strategy and delineates what to say.

• Leverage the marketing automation to understand the effectiveness of each customer touch point and channel to determine where you will be able to reach the largest portion of your audience. The data will show you if it’s in your store, on your website, or through a social media platform. From there, you can plan any type of automated marketing communication.

• Create the content and messaging for automated messaging that you may choose to use for email campaigns, social media responses, and mobile marketing messages. This is another place where the human element can personalize the content and imbue an emotional element to the messaging.

• Don’t overwork your marketing automation system by sending out too much content or run a multitude of campaigns simultaneously. Concentrate on one marketing campaign at a time. Use automation for launch and measurement while applying the human element to the concept and optimization processes. See what the automation analysis delivers so you understand how to improve the next campaign.

• Don’t set and forget because marketing automation still cannot run entirely on its own and deliver the best results. A human element is also essential to oversee the marketing automation process, regularly checking for how it’s working or what may need to be tweaked.

• Remember that machines don’t tell us everything we need to know about the data. While they can highlight patterns we might not be able to see, it’s still up to humans to truly understand what those patterns mean and how they can be applied to the strategic marketing process. Only a human marketer can determine the context for the data and specific factors that influence those results whereas a machine can only look at numbers for number’s sake. And, at the end of the day, customers are not numbers – they are people with unique problems and preferences even if there are patterns among them.

Combining Forces

The best way to approach this going forward is to remember that marketing automation can deliver the data that tells us, as marketers, how to create personalized messages. It is these personalized messages where the human element is most needed because it delivers the ability to first understand why customers or prospects behave a certain way and then can hit those emotions for better engagement.

This human element cannot be left out. No matter how much a machine can learn, do, and process, it most likely will never be able to truly emulate the human state full of complex emotions, interactions, and behaviors that only another human will understand (and sometimes we can’t even understand them!).

Busting A Myth

There are no shortage of myths when it comes to marketing automation. For example it is too difficult to deploy and use. Or it's only focused on outbound campaigns. 

Download Busting Common Myths of Marketing Automation to discover how to use marketing automation to attract, engage, and convert buyers across all marketing channels by streamlining workflow, monitoring social, and managing content.

And of course, bust some myths too. 

Image source: Pexels 

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How Netflix Maintains a Low Churn Rate by Keeping Customers Engaged & Watching

With over 90 million customers watching a combined 125 million hours of television and movies everyday, there’s no doubt that Netflix has changed the way we watch our favorite shows. It has also become a prime force in our daily lives — integrating into everything from mobile devices to our language and culture.

And with a relatively low 9% churn rate (lower than any other subscription streaming service), one has to wonder — how does a service like this continue to keep their customers engaged in both the short and long term? How do they succeed when others fall short? Let’s take a closer look and discover how they do it.

Why Engagement is So Crucial to Netflix

As a subscription service, each new month gives every Netflix users a chance to cancel the service.

Like all subscription companies, the best step Netflix can take to reduce churn is to create a great product that people are willing to pay for. They do this by having a large library of original and licensed content. As long as people keep watching, they’ll keep paying.

Let’s look at how Netflix achieves relatively low churn rates, when compared to their peers.

Reluctant to Switch

With more than a third of U.S. households subscribed to Netflix, it’s no secret they’re far ahead of their competitors (namely Amazon Prime and Hulu Plus) in the video streaming subscription race. Recent research by Parks Associates showed that only 4% of U.S. broadband households cancelled their Netflix service — representing almost 9% of Netflix’s subscriber base.

By comparison, 7% of users cancelled their Hulu Plus subscription within a year — but that figure represents approximately half of Hulu Plus’ current subscriber base.

(OTT refers to “Over the Top” – a term used in broadcasting to refer to internet-based transmission of media without an operator –as in cable or satellite — controlling or distributing the media).

What this tells us, is that not only are most households electing to keep their Netflix subscription and “test the waters” with other streaming services, but those same users keep coming back. But what is it that draws them back?

A Deeper Insight into User Preferences

Perhaps some of what makes Netflix so irresistible among its user base are its original shows. With fan favorites like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, Netflix has its finger on the pulse of what users are watching. And they’re not just skimming the surface, either. They look at things like:

• How many users watched a particular episode
• How many users watched an entire series
• How much of a gap was there between when the user watched one episode and the next?

And that’s not all. They’re also gathering data on:

• When you pause, rewind or fast-forward (or if you stop watching and never pick it back up again)
• What day you watch (most people watch TV shows over the week and movies on the weekend)
• What date and time you watch, as well as the zip code you’re watching from
• What device(s) you use to watch which media
• The ratings you give and the searches you conduct
• Your browsing and scrolling habits
• And even the data within the movies and shows themselves

Netflix knows when the credits roll – but it’s also speculated that they’re monitoring things like the volume, movie/show setting, colors and so on. All of this information is not just collected, but also acted upon.

Some might even say that Netflix took a huge gamble ($100 million to be exact) in purchasing the exclusive rights to House of Cards but they did so with a concrete hypothesis — that a large portion of its customers streamed “The Social Network”, directed by David Fincher from beginning to end. House of Cards is also directed by David Fincher. What’s more, they also noticed that films with Kevin Spacey tended to do well, as well as the original British version of House of Cards.

But Netflix didn’t just settle on one trailer to introduce users to House of Cards. Spacey fans saw trailers that exclusively featured him. Women who watched Thelma and Louise saw trailers featuring the female protagonists of House of Cards and big time film buffs saw trailers that reflected Mr. Fincher’s finest directing moments.

All of these points intersected in a way that practically lit up a path to customer engagement and retention. And all of them were made possible thanks to insights delivered by big data.

But this method only attracts users who happen to be watching other movies. What about when they’re not watching? Netflix has that covered, too.

Email: We Added a Show You Might Like

With the vast content library available, it would be overwhelming to not recommend shows to users. So Netflix doesn’t just collect data about the shows you watch — it acts on that data too, sending you emails when a show is added that you may like based on your existing viewing habits.

The email itself is simple and straightforward, and, this is the important part — you can play the episode right from within your mobile device, or add it to your watch list. So it’s not just notifying you that you might enjoy this show, but rather giving you an action to take that lets them better tweak suggestions according to your viewing habits.

Push and In-App Notification – New Season

Many people find push notifications bothersome and frustrating — but it all depends on where they come from. Things that affect users directly – like utilities (your water or electricity is scheduled to be off for a time) or transportation (there’s a car wreck near you that may slow your commute) are definitely wanted.

Movie or series suggestions don’t seem like they’d be high up on users’ priority lists, but Netflix has done a fine job of customizing and fine tuning what gets shown to each user. For example, if you followed season 1 of House of Cards, Netflix lets you know that Season 2 is now available:

What it doesn’t do is inundate you with notifications when every new season or every new movie is listed. Each push notification is carefully crafted again, based on the data from your viewing habits. This way, it’s not intrusive, but rather engaging.

Recommendations for You

Netflix is also famous for its recommendations. It knows it has just 90 seconds or less to convince you that there’s something worth watching that’s catered to your tastes, it looks at things such as the genre you watch and your ratings, but also what you don’t watch. There’s a very real problem of overwhelming the user — with so many choices, Netflix doesn’t want to get too personal.

And it doesn’t care so much about what you watch, but rather that you watch. When given the choice between calling a friend, reading a book or watching Netflix, they obviously want you to keep coming back.

And although Netflix does push its own original series up on its recommendation pages, it plays a flat fee to content providers, so there’s no reason for its recommendation algorithm to favor one series over another. Everything it recommends to you, it does not just because of your viewing habits today, but also historically.

All of these options filter in to create a uniquely personalized — but not too personal — list of recommendations specifically tailored to each user. An engaged user is a happy user, and Netflix is pulling out all the stops to keep them watching.

Interestingly enough, the personalization algorithm resets every 24 hours, making it more likely that users will keep discovering current titles of interest from Netflix’s ever-growing catalog.

Split Testing

Not surprisingly, Netflix also does a great deal of split testing — a couple hundred tests each year to be exact. It randomly selects around 300,000 users from around the world and tests everything from images to font size.

Whenever major changes are made, such as a homepage redesign, users are understandably upset and backlash is imminent – it’s in our nature to tend to resist change. However, Netflix does a good job of easing them into the new design by explaining what has changed and why. According to Netflix’s vice president of product innovation, Chris Jaffe, however, less than half of their tests have a positive impact on metrics.

Conclusion

Even still, with so many options to keep users informed across nearly every type of device, Netflix is continuing to test, innovate and refine its algorithms to prevent churn and keep users watching — and those users are at its core in a quest for never-ending user experience growth.

What are your thoughts on Netflix’s methods to keep you hooked? Have you discovered new shows as a result of their recommendations? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today!

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5 Powerful Use Cases for Social Advocacy & How You Can Get Started

5 Powerful Use Cases for Social Advocacy & How You Can Get Started written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Over 50 million businesses now have a Facebook page and are actively reaching out to their target audience. As a consequence, the social network has reduced the organic reach of commercial content, to protect its users’ interests.

Ogilvy once predicted that organic reach of brand content would someday drop to zero, and brands need to prepare their outreach strategies to face that outcome.

In today’s social scenario, there is probably no better way to influence your target market than by establishing social advocates.

There are several end goals that you can have for social advocacy and different programs that you can build to achieve them. These are five powerful use cases of social advocacy.

1. Brand awareness

Isolated, a brand can reach 1-2% of its existing following by posting content on official networks. With the help of advocates that reach could be increased by as much as 561%, according to MSLGroup’s research.

Social posts also have short shelf-lives and stay in view only when they are shared and distributed by your community. To initiate that process, you need advocates.

If you want to quickly make an impact on a large following, you simply need to identify and active your social advocates. They can be super-fans, happy consumers or employees.

IronSource incentivized their content distribution and got staff involved. The result? 24% of their engagement today can be attributed to advocacy.

You simply need a platform through which you can share content with your advocates.

2. Lead generation & sales

When companies combine great content with advocate-based distribution, they have seen great results, like a five-fold increase in web traffic and 25% more leads.

IronSource has employees across departments (everything from tech to marketing) share content and promotes the company on social networks like Twitter.

The key is to ensure that your advocates are connected with your target market, directly or indirectly.

You could also encourage happy consumers to go vocal on social networks. They are likely to be connected with more prospects.

3. Improved talent acquisition

If your company has a great work culture that your employees are excited to be proud of, you could significantly improve your recruitment efficiency by using that to your advantage on social networks.

Many large organizations have employees share achievements, pictures of office retreats and activities and establish powerful employer brands on social networks.

• 69% of prospect employees who look your company up won’t apply if you have a bad reputation.
• Prospects who come through employees are far more likely to convert, and more quickly (Source: HRinAsia).

Starbucks has an entire Twitter page dedicated to employees and company culture called Starbucks Partners.

4. Crowd-sourced content

Content creation is expensive and time-consuming when not outsourced.

• Over 50% of B2B and B2C content marketers identify creating engaging content as a challenge.
• Over 90% B2B clients distrust content created by vendors.

Instead of creating all of your content, you could source it from your community of advocates.

Crowd-sourcing content gets people involved – employees, target groups and potential micro-influencers.

You can crowd-source content in 6 ways –

• Brainstorm with influencers on mutually beneficial content that you can create
• Regularly reach out to consumers for feedback and success stories
• Feature advocates on your blog or social pages as part of a post
• Round-up pre-existing tips or ideas from potential advocates on a post
• Target early adopters and encourage feedback
• Target niche communities and amplify distribution

Build these relationships before you need them, and see how content creation and distribution becomes easy for you.

5. Event marketing

Events, webinars, podcasts, and live streams have become important parts of content marketing in the current scenario. Brands create video and audio based aids to connect with and get on the good books of their target groups.

Typically, only 25% of the people who register for online events, show up, and only about half or less of that group of people stay until the end. To ensure that you have that capacity optimized, you need to expand your reach and increase your registrations.

Advocates can help you create event buzz, before, during and after the event.

Most events create dedicated hashtags and connect their advocates with content to make the sharing easy.

You can use email newsletters or advocacy platforms to distribute your content to advocates.

Getting started

There are different types of advocates that you can employ or active – brand ambassadors, brand advocates or celebrities.

Brand ambassadors – These are people specifically employed by a brand to talk about it on social networks. They can be influencers, niche experts (bloggers or content channel owners) or employees.

Brand advocates – These are super-fans or people who appreciate your brand and/or product, interact with it naturally on social and are likely to participate in activities that you initiate.

Celebrities – Celebrities are usually contracted by brands with big budgets who want to reach a mass audience.

Identify your advocates

Identify the people who are connected with your target demographic and have influence over them. You can do that by setting keyword alerts on a social media monitoring tool like BrandWatch.

Set alerts for important hashtags, keywords and tangential concepts in your niche. Shortlist people who match your tone of voice, seem to lead conversations and have good engagement on their posts.

Build relationships with your advocates

Add your advocates’ Twitter handles or names to your social monitoring list, or create Twitter lists to monitor their activity.

Pay attention to their work and show them support by helping them distribute your content. Once you are certain that they know you and are comfortable with you, reach out to them with an advocacy agreement.

Create an agreement that benefits both parties.

Create and curate great content for your advocates to share

The better your content is, the more conversions you will get when it is amplified by your advocates. Avoid using advocate channels to directly sell your products right off the bat.

Create content that offers their audience value and reinforces the relationship between you and your advocates and their audience. Visual content, in particular, performs well on social. You could use a graphic design software like Venngage to turn your blog posts into infographics for sharing.

If you are working with employee advocates, having them share industry content can help improve their social presence and so the quality of the leads they attract and help you convert.

You could use a social media management dashboard like DrumUp that allows content curation and easy sharing with employees.

While running your social advocacy program, monitor your analytics on a regular basis (reach, engagement, click-throughs, website traffic, and conversions) and ascertain if your content and advocates are helping you achieve your intended goals.

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About the Author

Jessica Davis represents Godot Media, a leading content firm. Her areas of interest include social media and content marketing.

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Digital Marketing News: 15 Reasons for Brand Advocacy, Email Priorities and Google TV Ads

15 Reasons Why Brand Advocacy is the Bedrock of Your Business [Infographic] Although brand advocates are important for brand marketing - with referrals, user generated content, and positive online reviews being just a few of the benefits of brand advocacy, this infographic shows over 80% of companies are not using advocates in their marketing strategy, and 58% don't even know who their advocates are. Social Media Today The Email Priorities of Brand and Agency Marketers in 2017 MarketingProfs reports: "Some 30% of brand marketers say personalization is one of the top three areas of email marketing they really need to focus on in 2017, up from 22% last year; 28% say they need to focus on automated campaigns, 25% on segmentation, and 24% on measurement/analytics." MarketingProfs Google Sees Another Chance to Get Programmatic TV Right In a bid reminiscent of their 2012 attempt at TV advertising, Google has again invested in offering TV ads for programmatic buying that marketers can choose as part of their digital video ad buys through their ad tech platform. Will this turn out better than their last attempt? Time will tell. Ad Age Goodbye, Like button Pinterest announced in a press release: "After doing a bunch of research with Pinners, we found Pinterest is easier to understand when we remove the Like button altogether." This will not affect the functionality of the Save button, and other Likes will be retained in a new board called "Your Pinterest Likes". Pinterest Mobile Captures More Than Half Of All U.S. Internet Advertising Revenue For The First Time Ever, Total Digital Ad Spend Hits a Landmark $72.5 Billion in 2016 IAB reports: "Mobile advertising accounted for more than half (51%) of the record-breaking $72.5 billion spent by advertisers last year [...] The total represents a 22 percent increase, up from $59.6 billion in 2015. Mobile experienced a 77 percent upswing from $20.7 billion the previous year, hitting $36.6 billion in 2016." IAB New: LinkedIn Launches Matched Audiences LinkedIn is launching Matched Audiences, allowing marketers to utilize website retargeting, account targeting and contact targeting. These new tools will be available for all of LinkedIn's ad platforms. Will this help LinkedIn ads beat out Facebook for B2B advertisers looking for more targeting? Search Engine Journal eMarketer Releases New Programmatic Advertising Estimates Despite controversy around programmatic advertising in recent marketing headlines, eMarketer found that nearly four of every five digital display ad dollars in the US will go to programmatic advertising this year. eMarketer Facebook Is Testing Video Cover Images for Pages Facebook has confirmed that they're testing giving Pages the ability to upload videos as cover images, as you can see if you look at the Narcos Facebook page. It's unconfirmed if and when this update will roll out network-wide. AdWeek What were your top digital marketing news stories this week? We'll be back next week with more top digital marketing news! If you have something to share, sound off in the comments or Tweet it to us @toprank.

The post Digital Marketing News: 15 Reasons for Brand Advocacy, Email Priorities and Google TV Ads appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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Social Media Automation: What Works and What Doesn’t

Social Media Automation: What Works and What Doesn’t written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Businesses, or marketers to be more specific, can benefit from social media automation. With billions of people using Facebook, Instagram and other online channels at present, social media automation applications—or what marketers call as “gadgets from above”—can save precious time and money while also enhancing business strategies.

By commanding a system to do multiple functions at the same time, marketers are able to maximize their tasks, increasing one’s productivity and work efficiency. However, when done the wrong way, social media automation can cost you more than what you have gained. If an automated platform, for example, sends pre-made responses to the wrong customers, it may be seen as an act of insincerity and neglect, which can damage a brand’s good reputation.

A Significant Contribution to Business

The contribution of social media automation is essential for business. Personalized responses, targeted messaging, and/or being first in the lead are beneficial offers that can make a difference in business processes. But marketers should be cautious. Just because social media automation guarantees convenience and sales conversions, it doesn’t mean that one should automate their entire marketing system. Inappropriate responses, accidental spamming, and responding to customers with their pet peeves can lead to a quick online backslash.

It doesn’t have to be this way, especially if you can take control. What should you do to avoid such mishaps? Learn how social media automation works and when it’s ideal to use.

Social Media Automation and Its Benefits to Business

Social media automation apps make daily work processes relatively easier and faster. What marketers usually do in an hour or two can be accomplished in just a few minutes. Compared to manual operation, such applications are more cost-effective; some doesn’t even need close supervision. Marketers, even the most dedicated ones, can sleep while their apps work for them over time.

Here are a few social media automation apps that can help you out:

Buffer – queues social media updates and instantly posts them anytime you want

Mention – collects all social media posts and website sources that mentioned your brand online

Feedly and Scoop.it – suggest relevant content, which you can share or get inspiration from

These applications can communicate through systems—without manual operation but useless time—making them necessary for a business and its various departments.

The Disadvantages

We know that unlike humans, social media automation apps are not capable of formulating genuine responses. They only answer according to what have been programmed, resulting in responses that do not and cannot suit every customer inquiry. Arguably, this is a problem often overlooked by businesses.

Leaving customer satisfaction to auto-response systems may only upset consumers. With today’s demands and swift innovation, customers tend to dislike canned responses, especially those that delay real reports and/or solutions.

Marketers should avoid this. There is nothing better than providing a personal response that will make customers feel regarded and special. Responding to your customers with their pet peeves is the last thing you would want; you’re only lucky if they’re sport enough to make jokes out of them.

Manual vs. Automated

There are specific solutions that cater differently to different social media issues. There are times when it’s okay to automate your posts and responses, and there are also times that it’s not. When choosing between manual and automated, think about each feature’s capabilities, limitations, and most of all, the satisfaction it can provide to customers. Let’s break it more specifically below.

Automated You Say? If you wish to provide a more genuine response to customers—answers that specifically cater to their needs and your company’s branding—then automation is not for you. Remember that social media automation apps can only generate the same answer—those you have provided for its system. By sending templated responses that do not suit their queries, you put them in a common place, which can make them feel insignificant.

Keep automation apps away from comments and messaging sections. Don’t let bots do all the talking. Any form of speech should be provided by a representative who knows the company well.

Doing It Manually. Here comes the positive side of this feature. Social media automation is great when assisting tasks such as looking for content suggestions, auto-publishing and searching for brand mentions. It plays a huge part in a company’s productivity by reducing the time and energy that a marketer pours into work. Keep in mind that social media automation apps should enhance your productivity not judge and understand customer reactions. Let them click buttons, let them bring you options, and let them show you what has been discovered—but never let them answer what they cannot.

Conclusion

Social media automation maximizes three major aspects of productivity: energy, time, and resources. Posting and monitoring have never been easier until social media automation came into being. There are many functions social media automation provides, but not all of them are right for your business. Know what applications to use—and how you can use them properly—for your business. You’ll see your marketing efforts skyrocket in no time.

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About the Author

Rick Enrico is the CEO and Founder of SlideGenius, a presentation design agency from San Diego, California. He regularly publishes expert presentation tips on the SlideGenius Blog. You can connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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