Here’s how businesses can best go about marketing their new or existing mobile app, to help expand their services

The app industry has been growing in competition over the years, with millions of business applications present on marketplaces such as the App Store and Google Play Store. This has seen an evolution of technologies underpinning such apps, such as cloud, blockchain and immersive reality, in the space in recent times.

But where to start; what challenges need to be considered and overcome; and how can organisations use their marketing strategy to get ahead of the competition? In this article, we explore how to market your mobile app.

Challenges to overcome

“Marketing an app is a challenging task, and small business owners need to carefully consider their approach in order to avoid wasting money on ineffective strategies,” said Beatriz Repiso, owner and CEO of Otternative Marketing.

Below are the biggest challenges for app developers to watch out for:

Budgeting

The first port of call for any business when it comes to marketing is the budget at your disposal. This can also prove the first hurdle to leap over when marketing an app, with resources often being limited and needing to balanced with other operations, such as employee management and production.

Trend analysis

Keeping up with trends in a quickly evolving industry, staying in tune with customer needs and monetising accordingly can also be easier said than done, but is paramount for marketing success. Marketing staff must always look to optimise their strategies in line with such change. In the monetisation planning stage, whether for free or paid apps, companies should examine their options — whether they be in-app purchases, subscriptions, or advertising — and determine which ones are the most appropriate for their market.

Data management 

Additionally, app developers often run into concerns around data privacy, with apps in the space on the whole becoming larger, utilising user data at an exponential rate. According to research conducted by marketing tech company Bango, many developers claim it has “never been more difficult” to acquire new paying users for their apps, due to public pressure over data privacy along with the sunset of IDFA and cookies.

“[The finding] is a big problem for the digital economy. We’ve been calling it ‘the App-ocalypse’,” said Bango co-founder and CMO, Anil Malhotra.

“For businesses relying on revenue from mobile apps, user acquisition is the name of the game, as it’s an economy that relies entirely on downloads and active users. So anything that impedes the sales funnel seriously disrupts the bottom line.”

This area of operations calls for an equally strong focus on compliance and protection over assets, to respond to an evolving regulatory landscape.

>See also: A guide to IT governance, risk and compliance

The steps to take

Once your organisation has agreed on the budget for marketing your mobile app, it’s then time to establish an actionable marketing plan with specific; measurable; achievable; relevant; and time-bound (SMART) objectives throughout.

Repiso explained: “These should align with the overall goals of the business. Examples can include increasing app downloads, improving user engagement, or generating revenue.”

Planning promotional content

From the start, companies need to plan the types of content to create and share for promotion of the app, including blogs, videos, and social media posts. Deep market research is needed to gauge how the competition is marketing their games, allowing you to find ways to differentiate. You should also consider the media and platforms that your target audience is most likely to use, and adapt the approach accordingly.

User acquisition

No successful app marketing strategy is complete without user acquisition — the aforementioned “name of the game” cited by Malhotra. Reaching new users within your target demographics can be achieved through:

• Search engine optimisation (SEO): As businesses across all sectors have increased their online presence over the past few years, SEO has ascended up the marketing agenda as a vital tool to help stand out from the crowd. Using competitive and relevant keywords, and utilising link building can help with this area.
• Paid advertising: Enlisting the services of social media platforms and websites to display banner ads among other assets proves a common and effective way to get your name out to a wider audience.
• Social media influencers: Also a viable method is user acquisition through the presence of influencers on sites such as Instagram and YouTube. Often a go-to in the latter stages before going to market, companies can partner with content creators to promote the app through their channels. For example, promo codes are often used as a vehicle for discounts.

Analysis of performance

Once word starts getting out, marketing staff should consistently gauge the amount of views that each method of advertising is achieving. This can be done through social media marketing tools such as Buffer and Hootsuite, as well as analytical tools like Google Analytics.

According to Repiso, app developers should also “engage with users and gather feedback; understand what users like and dislike about the app, and make improvements as needed.”

By no means does marketing of apps end with the release — marketers should always be adjusting their strategies where necessary, in line with the evolution of industry trends and user behaviours.

Disrupting the competitive gaming space

Breaking through the noise can be a fearful prospect with much uncertainty. But by following these steps and overcoming common challenges on your marketing journey, you can successfully market your mobile app to a new or established audience and stay responsive to demand.

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The post How to market your mobile app appeared first on Information Age.

Ron Kol, CTO of Bright Data, discusses how web scraping can help organisations maintain a competitive edge in their market

Public web scraping has been expanding its reach, even to companies that were once extremely reluctant in adopting it. Why? For the simple fact it helps them remain competitive in one of the most volatile periods we can remember. The ongoing economic crisis across the world following a global pandemic hasn’t been kind to many businesses, which is why they’re now looking to tap into any advantage available — and public web scraping is there to help.

>See also: Five principles for navigating the post-pandemic era

Defining web scraping

In simple terms, web scraping is the process of accessing, collecting, indexing and structuring target web data for organisations to draw insights from.

Public web scraping is used by businesses to collect different types of information depending on their short-term and long-term business needs. Some of the most popular use cases for web scraping include real-time competitive pricing data to inform and shape dynamic pricing strategies. The majority of the larger e-commerce brands use data points to change pricing eight or more times per day. They also use this capability to gather public social media data to assess target audience sentiments in real-time, as well as product reviews and trending topics.

Additionally, obtaining data on market competitor activity is a common use case. For example, data on ongoing funding, changes in leadership, employee skillsets, or new recruitments all helps businesses to perform a reliable market analysis, build better recruitment practices and identify under-the-radar investment opportunities.

How can businesses use web scraping to improve day-to-day operations?

Web scraping can be used in various ways to help improve day-to-day operations, saving businesses time and money. For e-commerce businesses, web scraping can be used in several ways. For example, it can help gather data about competitor products, prices, and marketing strategies. It can also help businesses discover potential customers or suppliers that they’ve not considered or been able to target before. This kind of information is extremely valuable for e-commerce businesses in mapping out their business strategy and saves them a huge amount of money and time if they were to do it manually.

Human resource (HR) managers are another example. They can use public data sets to improve HR processes around recruitment, career development, performance, and compensation. They do this by retrieving public web data from public profiles and websites such as LinkedIn, Indeed and Glassdoor, which helps reveal a clearer picture around how people seek employment and how organisations can attract and retain employees.

>See also: Support, not surveillance: maintaining employee productivity with HR software

The top three advantages of a web scraping-first approach for businesses

First, comparing to manual web data collection, automated public web scraping tools are much quicker at retrieving data. As web scraping is becoming increasingly complex and time consuming, it’s important that businesses are investing in the right technology. Automated tools allow companies to save time and resources that go into the process, such as target site unblocking, dataset cleaning, and data structuring.

Second, web scraping software allows companies to focus on the analysis of the data rather than the collection process, shifting the burden of maintaining hardware and software to a third party.

Third and final, using these tools means companies can cut costs by benefitting from a third party’s expertise. For example, when looking to achieve full website discovery, companies will need to first identify target sites, and then manoeuvre around blocks like rate limitations. There are existing solutions that have developed and perfected these capabilities, however, “newbies” to the field will need to spend a lot of time and resources to achieve similar results.

To put it simply, web scraping is an invaluable tool for businesses across different industries, that are looking for new ways to gain insights to inform their business strategy and development. There are an abundance of web scraping tools out there, so it’s important that businesses are investing in the right tools and technology. With the right technology, they can now simplify complex processes and get the exact data they need for a better decision-making process in the future.

Related:

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What is the role of the data manager? — What is the role of a data manager today, what skills does the job require and what challenges do data managers face?

The post How can web scraping help businesses maintain a competitive edge? appeared first on Information Age.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a challenge, but strong data privacy opens up the opportunity for strong advantage over the competition, such as improved customer loyalty and more efficient operations.

The negative headlines around GDPR — such as Amazon‘s fine earlier this year, the largest issued of its kind to date — can encourage businesses to see compliance as a burden. The truth is, it can be an opportunity to win and retain new customers if you can turn respect for consent and protection of privacy into competitive differentiators.

Compliant businesses, which accept that the thrust of the new regulation is to place informed consent at the heart of their operations, can immediately start enjoying the benefits of better engaged customers who are more loyal than before. Clearer, easier to understand customer consent processes will be at the heart of this change, and will offer audiences genuine choice about what data is collected and how it is used.

>See also: The multinational impact of GDPR

A study by Forrester, commissioned by Evidon, identified the benefits companies expect to enjoy through more transparent, compliant customer relationships. The number one positive outcome, for 35 per cent of companies surveyed, was improved customer satisfaction. This was closely followed by increased loyalty (34 per cent); improved brand perception (33 per cent); and deeper customer engagement (30 per cent).

Cleansing data brings ROI rewards

Customer relationships are not the only business-critical factor that can be improved. There are operational efficiencies and performance gains to be made through compliant data practices.

Getting a data map for a business is not only required to ensure compliance runs throughout a business, but can help streamline operations by deduping lists and ensure customer information is up to date and as accurate as possible, while also being processed with consent (or another lawful basis under GDPR).

In turn, this can help deliver on the new rights any EU citizen has to enquire what data a business holds on them and ask for it to be deleted or corrected.

Monitoring the digital supply chain that powers a website can also yield benefits by eliminating unnecessary or unwarranted data collection practices which depress overall site performance and can leak data to the competition.

>See also: GDPR: the good, the not so bad and the opportunities

The first question all businesses will need to ask themselves, is whether they can actually provide a person with a complete and accurate report of all the personal data the business holds about them, as the new law requires. Even more challenging: can that data be deleted, corrected and edited if the person exercises their right to do so, especially if the data is repeated across silos as is the case with so many internal file copy-based business processes?

Being able to meet this challenge not only puts a company a long way towards compliance and shows customers their data rights are being respected, it is also the data equivalent of a data cleanse that can only improve performance and ROI.

Improved efficiency, SEO boosts and better experiences

As part of their GDPR preparations, businesses will need to look at the way they, and their partners, collect data from the public to ensure they can deliver these improved, compliant data practices.

Those that can are likely to realise collateral benefits, such as improved campaign performance, reduced digital supply chain costs, and faster user experiences, all driving up overall ROI.

Evidon research found that almost 70 per cent of site operators surveyed had third party marketing technologies running on their site that they were unaware of. Not only were these unmanaged technologies affecting performance for nearly 80 per cent of sites in that category, more than half (57 per cent) feared they might be suffering some form of data leakage via some of that third party code.

While the likes of Google are moving away from third-party cookies, organisations will need to stay vigilant.

>See also: GDPR compliance – the real implications for businesses

To be confident GDPR compliance has been achieved, and is being maintained, businesses need to know who is running code and tags on their site.

When a company restores order to its own properties, and ensures only tags from GDPR-compliant operators are running, two things happen. The business protects itself from losing face and possibly being fined for non-compliance and the risk of inadvertent data leaks. It also gets a site that runs far more efficiently, more effectively and incurs less downtime and fewer staff hours spent trying to resolve third party issues.

That is good for customer experience. It is also a must for high SEO rankings in a mobile-first, accessibility-aware media landscape.

Securing a competitive advantage

It is a similar story of a competitive edge waiting to be revealed through compliance when it comes to protecting personal data.

The fines that non-compliance brings are perhaps one of the most-reported aspects of the new regulation. Serious breaches can cost a company €20m, or 4 per cent of global annual revenue per offence, but the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has been very clear it has no intention to scapegoat businesses using these powers.

The GDPR is very clear that data has to be held and processed securely and though the law does not outline how, Article 32 provides a clear prescription for what is expected. The ICO’s advice is that processing the minimum amount of personally identifiable information possible is a good start.

>See also: What is the impact of the changing data protection landscape?

Then, storing it securely and in an encrypted form makes sense. In certain circumstances, anonymising data so it can collectively provide insight without revealing identities is another tactic many organisations are using.

Securing data so it cannot be hacked is a worthy end in its own right. After reassuring customers that you embrace a more transparent relationship in processing data, making sure their data is safe is just good business, regardless of any compliance requirements.

One need only look at how the infamous cyber attack on TalkTalk for a good example. The telco has revealed the breach in October 2015 cost £60 million and saw 101,000 customers switch provider.

Equifax, a US-based credit reporting agency, admitted in September 2017 to losing the personal information of over 145 million US citizens (and over 400,00 UK ones) and is now facing a crippling 50-state class-action lawsuit.

Similar cases have been seen in the hospitality and airline sectors also, with notable breaches happening to the likes of EasyJet and Marriott.

Customers are worth it

There is no point pretending GDPR compliance is not an expensive challenge. Forrester’s research work, commissioned by Evidon, found that nearly one in two business (48 per cent) are spending £1m or more on GDPR compliance, and nearly three in four (72 per cent) have been preparing for the new regulation for a year or more.

>See also: 5 reasons to appoint a data protection officer immediately

However, when the positives are factored in, it looks like money well spent, compared to the alternative. Staying GDPR compliant gives companies an advantage over rivals, as they are beginning to forge more trusting customer relationships which they fully expect will deepen loyalty and drive up the bottom line.

By clearly handling that data lawfully and securely, companies can make privacy a unique selling point.

It is just as much about restoring trust by reassuring consumers their data is now both respected, and protected.

Related:

Information Age guide to data + privacy — Data and privacy regulation is becoming increasingly complicated, with the EU set to fine companies up to €20m for misusing people’s information. Here are strategies and tools to ensure you stay compliant.

The best IT compliance tools for your business — Exploring some of the best IT compliance tools and methods that are suitable for all types of business.

The post Data privacy can give businesses a competitive advantage appeared first on Information Age.

Google faces another anti-competition allegation lawsuit, this time for depriving newspapers and online blogs of billions of pounds in ad revenue

Up to £21.6bn is being claimed in line with class action complaints in the UK and the Netherlands, which dispute that Google is unfairly sidelining the income of media outlets while profiting from online advertising, reports The Telegraph.

Law firms Geradin Partners and Humphries Kerstetter are said to be leading the lawsuits, planned to be brought to the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal, and a court in the Netherlands, on behalf of thousands of online publishers.

Additionally, the claim is being backed by litigation funders Harbour.

It is alleged that the corporation’s ad auction technology has been used to distort competition and benefit its own advertising services.

According to Humphries Kerstetter partner Toby Starr, alleged UK outlets affected may have missed out on up to £7bn in revenues since 2014.

He commented: “This includes news websites up and down the country with large daily readerships as well as the thousands of small business owners who depend on advertising revenue, be it from their fishing website, food blog, football fanzine or other online content they have spent time creating.”

Google are yet to comment on the claims being made.

While Google and Facebook have been heavily bolstering their online advertising efforts in the past few years, newspaper ad revenue has been impacted by the collapse of brand advertising and classified ad sales in the last 20 years.

If this particular case goes in favour of the claimants, litigation funders will be paid a share of the proceeds being claimed.

Related:

How the regulation of big tech can affect your business — The UK’s pending Online Safety Bill and the EU’s Digital Services Act are designed for the regulation of big tech, but there is the issue of legal but harmful and unintended consequences that can affect your business.

Funding the future web: what next after third-party cookies? — Alex Hazell, head of EMEA legal at Acxiom, discusses what the future holds for the web as we know it, as Google plans to transition away from third-party cookies.

The post £20bn claim addressed to Google for depriving publishers of ad revenue appeared first on Information Age.

With an abundance of consumer data generated daily, business owners are witnessing a more complex business environment than ever post-pandemic.

If customer information is not handled properly, it will become the biggest pain point for efficiency with forecasting, decision making and ultimately — the sales and purchase processes. Satisfied customers are the most valuable asset to any business, but how can you successfully deal with these challenges whilst building profitable customer relationships?

To combat these issues, businesses typically purchase enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) software separately. CRM deals with front-end information, such as recording customer interactions, sales tracking, pipeline management, prospecting, and creating/evaluating marketing campaigns. These software markets are continuing to surge — the ERP and CRM spaces are projected to generate revenue of $123.4bn and $170bn by 2030, respectively.

This helps businesses understand prospects and clients, manage relationships and sales pipeline, and up sell and cross-sell products. On the other hand, ERP software handles critical backend processes; including purchase history, billing and shipping details, accounting information, financial data, and supply chain management details.

>See also: The beginning of AI in the enterprise

Although having separate systems might appear more manageable, integrating them into one software will certainly streamline business processes and boost productivity.

Statistics indicate ERP systems can increase order-to-shipment times by as much as 23 per cent whilst providing an inventory accuracy average of 97 per cent, and considering satisfied customers are the most valuable asset to any business, imagine the benefits of a unified system. With this in mind, here are key advantages of ERP and CRM integration.

First, why is ERP/CRM integration so crucial?

Typically, businesses purchase and deploy ERP and CRM systems separately. However, if your ERP and CRM systems have their own databases, you will consistently have to worry about keeping them synchronised.

Whether it’s a CRM user from customer service or an ERP user from billing who updates a customer’s account, any changes implemented in one system will have to be transferred to the other.

Considering this is a manual process, having to wait for a database to update before you can, for example, process bills, replenish inventory levels and arrange product returns for customers, will result in slower operations and an increased risk of database errors.

>See also: Software verification: the first step towards safe and resilient systems

Applying an integrated CRM functionality to your ERP solution will ensure both systems share one database; meaning updates in either system are visible instantaneously.

Customers can be billed faster and any product returns can be automated between systems; providing your business with clearer visibility into all stages of your business’ sales process.

A 360 degree view of your customers

Exactly how well does your business know its customers? One of the biggest advantages of ERP and CRM integration is that it provides a complete view of your customers. From sales and support to finance and accounting; these systems provide complete visibility on your customer’s buying habits, order history and general needs.

Not only does this provide you with a better insight into your customer base, but it can also help you build lasting relationships and determine where there is potential for future growth. Consistent data gives you better analytics and reporting, so you can track changes in your customers preferences, profitability, and loyalty.

>See also: Next stop, software: how technology is revolutionising train design

Increased mobility

When your sales team are in the middle of a crucial touchpoint throughout a customer’s journey, having on-the-go access to all customer inventory and orders alongside product and pricing information will assist in closing deals more efficiently — they must have up-to-date data during the interaction, not afterwards.

ERP systems such as Pegasus software enable a sales team to view a customer’s credit limit, current balance, a list of outstanding invoices and previous orders placed; meaning they will have the full history of the customer’s purchasing patterns.

With affective integration, employees from various departments will also find it easier to collaborate, for streamlined information keeps everyone in your business on the same page.

Managers can keep a track of all the critical business operations in real time, which will aid them to make more informed business decisions.

Faster access to crucial information

Without a fully integrated system, employees run the risk of becoming less efficient, meaning your customers will pay the price.

>See also: Low-code technology: an emerging term that needs more definition

For example, when a customer contacts you requesting an order status update, your customer service representative should not have to trawl through different systems to access that information or inquire with other employees, for this could result in a negative customer experience, and therefore a loss in business.

A fully integrated CRM and ERP solution will provide employees with access to important information in real-time. With the push of a button, they can retrieve information on inventory levels, shipments, customer financials, order history, returns, payments, pricing and more.

Eliminate tedious data entry and duplication

Although both ERP and CRM systems hold account and contact information, it is done for different purposes — CRM is focused on support/sales and prospects; whereas ERP is focused on inventory, warehouse, shipping and billing address, etc.

The ERP and CRM integration removes the tedious necessity of duplicating data entry by providing identical rules for each system. For instance, any alterations made in the ERP database will reflect in the CRM system and vice-versa. The same principle also applies for the addition or removal of custom fields, new entries or changes in the database.

Improved order, inventory and quote management

Once a CRM proposal has generated into an order in the ERP software, having to switch systems and re-enter the data multiple times is neither time-sensitive nor practical.

With ERP and CRM integration, businesses can turn proposal generation (created in the CRM) into actual orders (executed and tracked at the ERP level) using one system; reducing time consumption for data management and increasing company efficiency. In addition, a sales team would have enhanced visibility regarding order status updates for customers and easy access to make necessary changes if needed.

>See also: What digital trends will be seen this year?

Also, while quoting for a prospect/customer in CRM, a sales representative can quote the most accurate pricing by using the integrated ERP solution to retrieve the updated pricing information. Any promotional or discount pricing will be available in the CRM as well.

Reduced IT and training overheads

Statistics indicate that businesses spend a yearly average of $1,071 on training per employee and 64 hours a year training employees — that’s a substantial amount of expenditure and lost time.

With a single, unified platform for both ERP and CRM, there is no need of maintaining two separate systems resulting in reduced IT costs. Likewise, if the integration is carried out efficiently, the amount of support and training goes down, for training sessions would only be required for the combined system instead of the individual systems.

Staff might be sceptical to embrace more than one piece of software, especially if it requires extensive training. Learning to use both ERP and CRM at the same time can be a challenge, resulting in poor adoption rates post-implementation.

The combination of these two programs makes it easier for employees to gather and analyse data — they can familiarise themselves with a singular piece of software and spend time learning all of its features.

Sourced by Martin Craze, founder and CEO of Applied Business Computers

Looking for a new CRM? Here are three top CRMs to choose from

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The post 6 key advantages of ERP and CRM software integration appeared first on Information Age.

Matt Shearer, CPO of Data Language, discusses how knowledge graphs can bolster organisations’ content reach and engagement

Since the advent of the internet, publishers have had their business models upended by the sheer pace of change. Some have acted quickly to adapt to the digital world, but many are struggling to keep up with the flux of digital publishing processes, and the move from a document-centric landscape to a data-led one. They may understand the challenges facing them in a competitive and disruptive world, but many publishers remain unsure how to unlock the value of their content to improve reach and engagement.

Publishers with strong subscription bases should be in a strong position to track and measure content consumption patterns and to provide well-informed customisation and tailored experiences for their customers. However, many of them are not able to truly leverage this because they do not maintain a single view of the important subject data in their knowledge estate. This can be described as a ‘Single Subject View’ — similar to the concept of a Single Customer View — and is applied to the view of the things that are important within the publisher’s content — their core knowledge assets. A lack of a Single Subject View prevents publishers from giving their subscribers the content that interests them, at a time when their intent is at its highest.

Many publishers are looking to knowledge management as a tool to reach and engage audiences. Efficient knowledge management speeds up the publishing cycle and improves content intelligence by removing duplication, and enabling a Single Subject View across a publisher’s entire content estate. This also enables more rapid innovation, as it makes it easier for a publisher to launch new ways of presenting the content, without having to rework the knowledge foundations.

Here are three best practices to achieve effective knowledge management:

Create a shared ‘living ‘map’ of the business

Like other areas of digital transformation, best practice information management is best informed by developing a living ‘map’ and shared vision of your organisation’s data landscape. Many use a ‘domain model’ — a conceptual model that incorporates both the important elements of your business and, crucially, how they relate to one another. Collectively understanding what challenges need to be resolved and which gaps need to be filled, will help you prioritise the next steps. Involve your employees in this; spend some time and tease the information you need out of them — they may not understand the importance of the information they hold. The value locked in their heads is a large part of your core business advantage and something that will be more challenging to access if people aren’t always together in the office.

Develop an information backbone

One fundamentally important element that is so often neglected in favour of deploying exciting new technology is a strong information backbone. Once you have established your shared map, the next step is to move this into use so that your staff and systems can connect the valuable information across your business processes. This is commonly referred to as ‘information architecture’. This crucial work is required to enable data portability and interoperability — the ability to use and move core business data between different applications. Without data portability, it is challenging to connect assets across company silos, which is critical to quickly adapt to changing market conditions. As organisations store growing quantities of data and move data from one use case to another, they need to have their information assets in portable, structured formats that can be repurposed quickly to help them adapt.

Utilise knowledge graph technology

A particularly powerful way to structure your information backbone is to use a knowledge graph. They are fast becoming an integral part of organisations’ data landscapes as they provide a human and machine-readable database of all the things of interest to the enterprise in their domain. Using a knowledge graph, a single metadata allocation on one piece of information could then be used to connect that information with other groupings and contexts automatically, even several logical steps from that original piece of metadata. Truly agile organisations will increasingly use knowledge graphs to enable more devolved innovation.

Smart knowledge management is a worthy undertaking as part of the journey to drive increased efficiency and reach maximum audience engagement. It is crucial to consider elements such as a well thought out strategy and portable knowledge assets because, without these aspects, a publisher’s data strategy will not be set up for ongoing success.

Related:

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Why CIOs are turning to knowledge graphs for critical business help — Maya Natarajan, senior director, knowledge graphs at Neo4j, delves into why CIOs are looking to knowledge graph capabilities for critical business help.

The post How knowledge graphs can improve content reach and engagement appeared first on Information Age.

Alex Hazell, head of EMEA legal at Acxiom, discusses what the future holds for the web as we know it, as Google plans to transition away from third-party cookies

Early February 2022 saw Google’s plan to replace third-party cookies clear a major hurdle. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority announced it had formally accepted the company’s commitments to promote competition, safeguard ad-funded options for online publishers, as well as user privacy. The formal acceptance means those commitments become legally binding.

Third-party cookies, until now, have been the backbone of online advertising. As a mechanism to unify browsing behaviour across multiple websites, they’ve powered much of the Adtech world. Adtech platforms using third-party cookies have been the primary way brands have been able to understand user behaviours, measure the performance of their campaigns, create relevant advertising audiences, and get more insight into the journeys their potential customers are making.

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Interest-based marketing

The alternative that Google looks to have settled on with its Topics API works to serve adverts to users based on broad categories of interests, as opposed to the more granular way the third-party cookie operates. The initial set of topics will number around 350, and the key is that users will eventually be able to see what topics are being shared about them or disable the feature entirely – giving them more control over their data. As its Chrome browser has an almost 65% market share, this is seismic for brands, online marketers and publishers alike. Other players such as Apple’s Safari and Firefox have already discontinued third-party cookie support.

Central to this debate is what counts as ‘personal data’. While the Topics API is showing promise as a possible future solution, it still involves singling out a particular device and treating it differently using certain attributes – even if they are as generic as subjects of interest. The mission for Google will be finding a balance between capturing information that’s useful for online advertising to be effective enough to fund the free and open web as it currently stands, while at the same time empowering consumers with an awareness of what’s happening and safeguarding them. Further, perhaps unintended anti-competitive effects of the new solution need to be addressed.

First-party alternatives

A variety of parties are affected by the pivot away from third-party cookies, often with quite different interests. Advertisers are seeking the best possible returns on their investment. Publishers want to know any advertising they’re using to support their content isn’t negatively impacting user experience, but is equally relevant enough to be useful to their clients. Regulators, meanwhile, are under pressure from some quarters to do more to rein in the perceived power of big tech and the ability for companies to collect, analyse and work with consumer data. These divergences mean a compromise is inevitable.

At the same time, care needs to be taken to ensure privacy is not used as an excuse to shore up market dominance. No brand can afford to ignore the big ‘walled gardens’ of Apple, Google and Meta, but they must also work to find ways to create their own first-party data and presence, using the channels they have at their disposal. If they remain heavily reliant on the big tech players and their systems, they’ll have little or no ability to control or orientate themselves.

Any opportunity brands have to encourage users to share their preferences with an affirmative permission, they must leap on. This includes the use of first-party ‘tags’ on the brand’s content across both owned media and paid media, so marketeers can continue to understand what marketing is working and offer a differentiated consumer experience.

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Striking the right balance

Google’s Topics API is by no means the only alternative being developed to the third-party cookie. Acxiom, for example, is involved with the International Accreditation Forum (IAF), and data technology vendor Anonos in the 5th Cookie Initiative.

What should be welcomed across the whole industry is a spirit of transparency. However, Google’s commitments to work with external partners is a positive step, because the future of an ad-supported, free Internet can’t come without collaboration and compromise between Adtech players, publishers and marketers. In a world where regulators globally have a rising focus on privacy, consumer trust in the process must be built at every opportunity. Finding the right balance between privacy safeguarding, and effective personalisation, is in everyone’s interest to reach.

The post Funding the future web: what next after third-party cookies? appeared first on Information Age.

Increased public demand for user privacy has driven a dramatic change in the way that advertisers collect information on mobile devices and track and target users with ads. Apple rewrote the script on user privacy by getting rid of its IDFA – a unique identifier for advertisers. The information provided by the IDFA was pivotal for informed and tailored advertising, but has become markedly scarce as only 21% of iOS users are currently opting into ad tracking. This is putting pressure on major app developers and advertisers to revert back to the basics on how to successfully reach their desired audiences and measure campaign effectiveness. These changes, while exciting, bring a host of jargon-heavy policies and solutions such as “probabilisitic attribution” and “SKAdNetwork”. This new privacy ecosystem will continue to dictate how business decision makers run their operations without falling foul of any new rule changes. So, what does a mobile marketer need to know to ensure successful decisions are made post iOS 14.5?

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Three facets of the policy currently in place

At their most basic level, the new policies offer users an opt-out option for IDFA collection, referred to as Limit Ad Tracking or LAT. Its effect is simple — with LAT in action, advertisers are unable to connect a specific device to a specific user. This means marketers can’t target ads based on user behaviour, which is a fundamental indicator of the user’s interests. With LAT in place, AdTech companies can still collect data but the range is reduced to data points such as the iOS version of the device in use, the version of the app and the category of the app, all of which can only build a vague image of who the user is.

Ingenuity is needed to interpret this data in a way that profits the business’ time and workflow. For example, LAT only applies to interactions via the app itself, data collected from a business’s website or other sources need not comply. Indeed, many businesses have been collecting data through other means for some time, as LAT isn’t a new feature, just a setting that users were previously unaware of.

The release of iOS 14.5 also brought on other changes to traditional user tracking, most notably App Tracking Transparency (ATT). Like LAT, ATT is a simple concept in our new privacy landscape, but crucially important to any mobile marketer looking to gain a rooted understanding of policy. Through ATT, developers can ask the user’s permission to track data from their app but only after explaining how data is used – ensuring users remain in control of their data rights.

Apple has developed firm guidelines around ATT and how developers can incorporate it as it can appear at any stage throughout the app experience. For example, in order to comply, developers cannot use language deemed encouraging to users to influence opt-in, nor can they offer in-app rewards or any other type of incentive to the user. It is a small criterion, but one that developers would do well to pay heed to as ATT, if abided by, can provide some of the most accurate information on users.

Cousin to LAT and ATT is contextual app targeting. It uses metadata (data that describes other data without disclosing the specific content), device information or any other contextual signals to garner details of a specific user. In cases where a device identifier isn’t available, it serves as a useful tool for targeting ads. Contextual app targeting runs on the same remit as contextual advertising, a familiar practise for any modern marketer. Contextual advertising targets ads based on the content of the website. For example, a website with keywords of “beauty” or “luxury” is more likely to host ads with a similar context, like make-up brands or online dress-up games. Contextual app targeting works similarly, but takes its parameters from other data points such as the app store’s category, the keyboard language and hardware version.

What is SKAdNetwork and probablilistic attribution?

SKAdNetwork is Apple’s 2018 alternative to traditional campaign measurement and install attribution, at the heart of which is privacy. With LAT and ATT in full force, SKAdNetwork is how Apple allows advertisers to attribute installs to the original campaigns – specifically for users who chose not to opt in. Apple handles the data and cleans it of any information that could prevent it from being anonymous before passing the data to ad networks. This cleaning stage can delay the process but it’s an effective way to stop the ad networks from having the raw data themselves and breaking the terms set by IDFA.

The next step is probabilistic attribution, a process of assigning campaign membership probabilities to an acquired user based on the attributes and behaviour of that user. Probabilistic attribution can be used to connect a user’s behaviour to one or many campaigns, which is useful for developers wanting to make the most out of their data. It takes data sets from anonymous user-level events and the aforementioned SKAdNetwork postbacks (a message between servers when a user acts on a website, network, or app), and combines both with campaign IDs and any ad network reporting data like impressions. This combination is used to deduce the likelihood of a particular install being driven by a specific campaign. In other words, it uses probability to assume which clicks come from which users and which adverts the users have seen. As it deals heavily in probability, it can never be 100% accurate, but the insight it provides post-IDFA is invaluable to mobile marketers.

One important distinction to make, is that as it doesn’t make a one-to-one attribution match between user and attribution source; probabilistic attribution is not “fingerprinting”. Instead, it creates a probability distribution of where a user is likely to have come from such as Facebook, Google or perhaps they are from an organic source. The data for probability distribution is provided by SKAdNetwork, ConversionValue, and anonymous user-level app data.

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The future of the advertising landscape

Navigating a post-IDFA landscape may be daunting, but it’s a challenge that comes with great rewards. Public demand for greater restrictions on access to user data has been steadily growing ever since the introduction of GDPR, and user privacy is likely to be even more important to advertising and marketing strategies in the future. By adhering to new user privacy preferences while still delivering engaging and compelling ad experiences, app marketers and developers are demonstrating that the user is at the heart of evolution in the industry.

The post How to navigate the iOS user privacy landscape in a post-IDFA world appeared first on Information Age.

Today, there is unprecedented market opportunity for businesses. Over two decades of digital growth have created massive addressable markets, where multi-billion dollar companies can be created and scaled in a matter of years. Technology-led companies (Amazon, SalesForce, Slack, Bumble, TikTok, Peloton, and the social media giants for instance) are building vast customer bases regardless of geography. By contrast, market research is stagnant. The global industry is estimated at $80 billion, but growth was just 4% in 2019, and dropped in 2020.

This is odd considering there should be an exponentially growing need. Not only are there thousands, if not tens of thousands, of high growth technology companies, but whole swathes of existing industries have to adopt a digital-first approach; a need which has been fast-tracked through the pandemic. On top of that, millions of companies are embracing marketing, and bringing advertising and marketing in-house. Competition is rife, and to succeed as a business, you need an intimate understanding of your current markets and audiences and future customer dynamics.

This is where market research should step in. Its entire remit as an industry is to help companies understand markets, audiences, and key customer segments, yet it isn’t. From my perspective, against this backdrop, the industry as a collective has failed.

Consider this: in a multi-market setting, the vast majority of its core remit requires mind-bendingly large budgets, huge time commitments, and an army of expertise just to get a study off the ground. Imagine you have a market opportunity that spans 20 or 30 countries – this is at least $1 million out of the gate to do properly, and at the true scale needed that budget could keep growing.

Even if you can get past the budgets, you need to think about time. Delivery is mainly still wedded to manual processes, ad-hoc, and predominantly based on offline research collection and a service-based delivery model. Spinning up a large multi-market custom project takes months in its traditional format, with delivery of data out of sync with our ever-changing world.

Where there has been innovation, predominately in self-serve research tools, there is still a need for huge budgets and expertise. The barriers to building surveys have been reduced, but it hasn’t led to the right data. This simply isn’t good enough.

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Solving the problem

For the last 12 years, I’ve been 100% focused on solving this problem. How can we, as an industry, give modern marketeers and growth businesses an up-to-date and detailed understanding of their audience? Not a small proxy from a niche collection of countries, but an actual perspective at scale.

The most effective approach today is to constantly collect data through online surveying at massive scale. The future of market research is millions of surveys spanning multiple countries. By investing in automation to collect, process and publish the data, the timeline from person to analyst immediately shrinks. The immediate availability of data is also crucial to revolutionising market research – businesses need insights in real-time, especially in the digital world where research can quickly become outdated.
This combination of constant data collection and immediate access solves many of the issues with traditional market research. It means accessible, global data that delivers immediate understanding at a fraction of the real cost or traditional market research cost, providing instant answers and insights versus six months of process and incredible cost.

Constantly collected data at scale is the only way to make market research relevant today; the costs, time, and expertise needed to operate globally mean it just does not make sense to approach it the traditional way. This is nothing new, I hear people say: syndicated data has existed for a generation. But crucially, it’s remained traditional in approach; it’s always been local, collected offline, small in scale, difficult to use, and slow to be released. It cannot answer the questions that modern marketers have about their audiences.

This new approach can replace many use cases that historically would have been solely delivered by custom projects, and, where it can’t, the digital approach means businesses can ask new questions and append to their existing data stack. Custom studies are shorter, can be targeted for no extra cost, and a technology-driven approach enables a significantly faster research process from respondent to end user.

I believe we can keep market research relevant, but it requires a digital shift if it is to align with this global age of opportunity.

The post The market research industry has utterly failed, and we need a new era appeared first on Information Age.

How can businesses measure the success of their marketing efforts? How does their current and future performance benchmark against competitors? How can they work out, for example, the levels of satisfaction and loyalty felt by their customers? The rise of social media during the last decade has simultaneously made these questions easier and in many ways more difficult to answer.

On the one hand, the internet is bristling with all the necessary data required to determine how a given business is performing, as customers willingly – even eagerly – share thoughts and opinions which provide insights into such vital issues as customer satisfaction. On the other hand, the sheer volume of the data available can make it challenging to separate the essential from the non-essential.

With the amount of potential key performance indicators (KPIs) provided in a world of social media, all businesses – large or small alike – need to address the fact that some indicators are more key than others.

On top of this, some companies – as noted by McKinsey partners Frédéric Gascon, Raffaele Carpi, and John Douglas – “measure and manage performance through lagging indicators, such as compliance with monthly output or quality targets. By the time the results are known, it is too late to influence the consequences.”

Clearly, then, the stage is set for new ways to measure performance: methods which are up-to-the-minute, capable of leveraging AI and machine learning technology to sift through swathes of data, and able to articulate actionable KPIs in a simple and accessible format.

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Out with the old

This is not, by any means, a new idea. In 2003, the concept of the NPS – Net Promoter Score – was born, and its simplicity reflects a real and ongoing desire to condense KPIs into a straightforward, actionable score.

A company’s NPS can be worked out by asking a single question to customers, usually delivered via a survey: “on a scale from 0-10, how likely is it that you would recommend Brand X to friends and colleagues?”

Respondents can then be split into different categories. Those who provide a score of 0-6 are considered detractors, 7s and 8s are passives, while 9s and 10s can be understood as active promoters. The NPS score itself can then be calculated as follows: NPS = (promoters-detractors)/all respondents) X 100, with scores ranging from -100 to +100. The result is a single figure which, according to Fortune, is used by 60% of the Fortune 1000 to predict customer behaviour and, by extension, the prospects of a given company.

As appealing as a single figure is, however, the NPS has its flaws – in fact, according to one study from The TQM Journal, NPS has been found “to be a very poor predictor of customer loyalty and customer satisfaction.”

This is, perhaps, unsurprising – after all, not all survey responses are truthful, nor are they always a correct recollection of what really happened. And, in a digital world brimming with customer opinions, as brand Twitter accounts field complaints and Retweet praise, it is likely that better results are waiting to be found ‘in the wild’, where no one is asking any questions.

The goal, then, should be to combine the admirably concise reporting and sometimes predictive power of a single score-based figure with all the nuance provided by today’s vast quantities of available information.

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In with the new

Through the use of machine learning models, it is absolutely possible to gather detailed and unsolicited customer opinion through the analysis of social media and other online posts. Social media listening processes allow us not only to measure ‘buzz’ – or volume of online posts about a brand – but to determine the sentiment expressed towards that brand, whether it be positive, negative, or neutral.

Semantic machine learning models can go even further, in fact, by recognising purchase intent and recommendations; actual behaviour is captured by engagement ratios for likes, comments, and shares of a brand’s social media posts, and even the reach of a brand’s public relations initiatives.

It goes without saying that this kind of data is far more reliable and multi-faceted than the survey responses on which the NPS is dependent. The good news is that the information described above can indeed be collated into a single KPI.

Our data scientists, for example, have been able to choose from all available social intelligence metrics – buzz, purchase intent, net sentiment scoreTM (which is, itself, our trade marked composite metric) – and condense them into one number between 0 and 1 that we call the Social Presence Score (SPS).
The process is a little more complex than the formula for calculating NPS – it involves annotating the data and weighting these metrics with our own in-house method – but there are several business advantages to exploring alternatives to NPS.

Using systems like SPS, companies will gain the ability to benchmark their brand and its overall performances on the market against competitors (and, indeed, against their own performance in previous months or years), identify specific metrics that require improvement, and predict future performance – including sales.

Not only brands but also individuals are marketing in a world that is too complex to be measured with surveys alone, and it is therefore more important than ever to embrace KPIs based on sources such as social intelligence – alongside the exciting technology capable of turning those KPIs into actionable insights.

The post Is the Net Promoter Score ripe for replacement? appeared first on Information Age.

Marketing automation has been powering digital marketing for decades now, helping businesses to personalise campaigns and to aim the right messages at the right people. For marketing to be effective, however, it is essential to use technology as an enabler, not the driver.

No matter how sophisticated Martech becomes, it is not a magic bullet. Without the right balance of people, process and technology behind a marketing strategy, at best it will miss the mark, and at worst you may find yourself losing customers as a result of over-marketing. Keeping people at the heart of marketing helps to avoid and overcome these challenges, generate engagement and loyalty, keep things fresh and, most importantly, reminds organisations that even with access to all the data in the world, it is ultimately people who make buying decisions, not algorithms.

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Processes as frameworks for success

It’s amazing how many people I speak to whose marketing processes are driven by technology. It often seems that their end goal is to use all of the features and functionality of a Martech package, rather than taking a step back and adopting a more strategic approach aimed at increasing customer engagement.

Technology should be adopted to enhance marketing processes, not determine them. Martech exists to optimise: to speed up working, automate tasks where possible and – where it aligns with the strategic vision – to open up new opportunities. If Martech software can achieve the same goal as a manual process in a tenth of the time, for example, then it makes sense to use it. It should be up to the marketing team, the people, to design processes that allow for creativity, analytics and technology to work together; to ensure you are getting the most out of your investment in technology without shoehorning it into processes and campaigns for its own sake.

With this in mind, it is important that you have the right people and team structure in place who understand how, when and where to use technology to achieve the best results.

It’s all in the team

A strong marketing team is made up of people with a diverse range of skills – from strategists and data analysts to identify strengths and map trends and focus plans, to creatives and ‘doers’ to design and deliver beautifully tailored campaigns. A good marketer needs to understand how technology can help to enhance, personalise and deliver these campaigns through the appropriate channels – but also to be able to think beyond the barriers of what technology can provide.

Technology makes it easy to execute, analyse and measure a marketing strategy with the push of a button and while this is helpful – especially at scale – where we see the most effective personalised marketing is in teams with marketers who are not afraid to ask questions. They need to be able to query the ‘why’, ‘how’ and ‘who’ behind every marketing decision – whether technology or human driven – to ensure it is relevant, beneficial and being delivered to the right people in the best possible way. Good marketers know this and understand that if we want customers to continue to agree to share their data, we need to earn their trust.

For example, we have all received an email or seen a pop-up advert where this wasn’t the case. I recently received an email from a company I have transacted with in the past, having bought men’s outdoor clothing. The email offered me a sneak peek at the new season’s skirts and dresses – a bit off the mark. The odd mis-targeted communication may not put us off buying from a brand who has treated us well in the past, but constant, irrelevant emails – especially ones offering a discounted price for an item we’ve already purchased – will eventually take their toll and encourage customers to go elsewhere.

This misalignment can be avoided in organisations where people, aided by technology, make the final decisions when it comes to targeting and delivering campaigns and offers.

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Getting the balance right

Cultivating an understanding of how Martech works and the best ways to use it help to avoid mistakes like the one above. By investing in experienced team members as well as training and mentoring programmes, you can help to build team members’ confidence in using technology to streamline their ways of working, without becoming complacent or overly reliant on it.

The point of placing humans at the heart of marketing is not to eliminate automated customer journeys or downplay the importance of Martech – quite the opposite in fact. It is about having frameworks in place for easy decision making and marketers overseeing technology to ensure customers are receiving engaging, relevant and timely communications. AI and machine learning are brilliant, and will play an increasingly important role in marketing, but we are not yet at the stage where we can trust machines to do everything for us. I would argue that even then, we will still need people at the heart of marketing. After all, we are all more than just the sum of our data.

The post Putting people at the heart of digital marketing appeared first on Information Age.

For many years, online advertisers have been using cookies to track website visitors, improve the user experience, and collect data to target ads to the right audiences. Marketers value what cookies can tell them about what visitors are doing online when they aren’t on their website. This matters, as Amazon has taught us the value of being able to predict what customers want to buy by analysing online sales data. It’s a technique all modern brands are eager to apply. Today’s digital consumers need intelligent, highly context-sensitive recommendations and prompts. “You may also like” is a phrase that ushered in a new era in customer relations and tailored suggestions. As a result, brands can maximise the value they deliver, secure customer loyalty, and cross- and up-sell.

There’s one small problem — third-party cookies are on their way out. This highly useful functionality is set to end, with Google‘s efforts to phase out the third-party cookie on Chrome browsers by 2022. There’s no need to be unduly worried, however. Graph database technology is being used to construct recommendation engines that don’t rely on third party cookies. These recommendation engines can make use of web logs to offer the same Amazon-level of personalisation advertisers are used to — in fact, arguably more.

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A proven technology for enabling real-time recommendations

Graph databases cannot be simply exchanged for cookies. But they’re another route to the same thing: knowing your customer. We want to be intimately familiar with customers’ buying history to analyse their current choices before matching them to the most appropriate products. We must do all of this analysis in real-time before the customer moves to a competitor’s website, and a proven technology for enabling these real-time recommendations is graph technology.

Graph technology easily outperforms relational and NoSQL when connecting masses of buyer and product data to gain insight into customer needs and product trends. For example, eBay uses graph databases for a real-time recommendation engine. In the words of senior developer Volker Pacher, “we found [graph technology] to be literally thousands of times faster than our prior MySQL solution, with queries that require 10-100 times less code. Graph provides eBay with functionality that was previously impossible.”

To make real-time recommendations also requires the ability to instantly capture any new interests shown in the customer’s current visit. Matching historical and session data like this is easily achieved with a graph database. As a software developer at a leading big box retailer said, “graph helps us to understand our online shoppers’ behaviour and the relationship between our customers and products, providing a perfect tool for real-time product recommendations.”

Moving beyond third party cookies

And as we head toward a post-cookie future, retail and media firms can now analyse their weblogs to find connections over time. By analysing web traffic and click stream data, marketers can extract unique individual profiles. Identifying – and de-anonymising- users builds the foundation for more accurate recommendations, which result in a higher average number of visits per profile and creating better models of consumer habits. In the US, for instance, Meredith Corporation, a $3 billion media conglomerate with over 30 top consumer brands and a digital presence that reaches more than 180 million users a month, is using cookie co-occurrence, rather than third-party tracking data, to build unique customer profiles. Its senior data scientist, Ben Squire, said: “With millions of views and millions of unique visits per month across different topics and lifestyles, our consumers trust us for information on things that affect their daily lives, as well as pique their interest. By understanding and analysing this content and how it’s consumed, we strive to serve the needs of our audiences and advertisers alike.”

Historically, Meredith identified anonymous users through third-party cookies, but cookie loss across diverse devices and ITP 2.3 browsers that block cookies by default increase the difficulty of relying on them, which led to inefficiency. “If the cookie ID used in the models doesn’t appear again, then the money, time and effort that goes into building those models is lost,” he said. “Knowing your audience is not good enough; you need to see them again in order to act upon it.”

Meredith changed its approach. The company’s rich mix of media content naturally generates multiple, disparate streams of data. Meredith data scientists blended that data to find ways to identify users across those streams, and something interesting jumped out — pattern matching, which showed that the cookies designed to identify unique users were repeated across different data streams.

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‘A high-definition view’

As a result, the company built an Identity Graph incorporating more than 20 months of user data from first- and third-party sources. The graph database has more than 4.4 terabytes of data across 30 billion nodes, 67 billion properties, and 35 billion relationships. 350 million profiles that would have been considered unique individuals with different interests and patterns have been consolidated into 163 million richer and more accurate profiles. A high-definition view of user interests and preferences fuels stronger models, which leads to more relevant content and more users returning over time.

The company used graph algorithms to transform billions of page views into millions of pseudonymous identifiers with rich browsing profiles. The move has completely overhauled its understanding of customer behaviour. “We have increased our understanding of a customer by 20 to 30% by looking at how the data connects over time, rather than just looking at individual cookies themselves,” Squire confirmed. “Instead of ‘advertising in the dark,’ we now better understand our customers, which translates into significant revenue gains and better-served consumers.”

There are significant learnings here for other advertisers looking to survive the end of the third-party cookie. To wield the powerful recommendations engines brands need to compete with Amazon and other born-digital brands, leveraging data connections and joining the dots between the relationships has to happen. This is where graph software can help firms, both with your next marketing and advertising offer. And perhaps, your long-term survival in our looming cookie-less age.

The post Could graph technology neatly fill the cookie gap for marketers? appeared first on Information Age.

Marketplaces are now dominating the online sphere, which results in more unbranded searches being made by online shoppers who are looking for solutions to their queries, rather than a named-brand product. Nowadays, global brands can expect 58% of their searches to be unbranded, while surprisingly, for small and mid-sized businesses, the figure is much higher, sitting at around 81%. Of course, for many businesses that heavily rely on their brand awareness and branded searches to bring in revenue, this rise might be a cause for concern.

However, virtual and online marketplaces are now considered one of the most effective ways to scale globally, both for established businesses and smaller brands as they account for almost half of all global e-commerce sales. Whilst these platforms were once a place for small and independent brands, online retail giants such as Amazon and Walmart are beginning to scale their own marketplaces, capitalising on the nearly $2 trillion that is spent annually on the top 100 marketplaces.

The shift in search can be put down to a number of changes in the way we shop, consume media and use technology. Notably, the increasing access to voice search, with Alexa and Google devices now regular features in our homes, has encouraged the rise of question-based searches.

Understandably, competition on these platforms is increasing. So, in order to ensure their products are being presented to the right customers, businesses must work on product optimisation, while also building on their brand to encourage trust and repeat purchases.

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Recreating the “boutique” shopping experience online

One way to do this is by aligning in store and online experiences. For example, although the days of exploring treasure trove, boutique shops are dwindling in favour of the online environment, consumers are still looking for those unique, personalised experiences from brands.

In fact, 33% of consumers prefer to buy unique products over mass-manufactured items, which businesses should use as an opportunity for innovation within their product offering – to develop something that the other big retailers do not.

Etsy is the perfect example of how independent sellers have come together on one virtual marketplace platform to provide consumers with just that: the opportunity to find unique, handmade products, combined with the ease of shopping online.

The e-commerce and PPC perspectives

Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second. Whilst some of these are guaranteed to be named brand searches, many are following suit with the growing solution-led trend, creating a strong case for brands to focus their efforts on appearing in these results through search engine and product description optimisation.

For example, say a consumer is searching for loungewear. Emotional, descriptive words that create a sense of feel and a tailored result should play into your product descriptions, such as “warm loungewear”, “comfortable loungewear” or “soft loungewear”.

The idea here is to narrow down descriptions to give people exactly what they want when performing these niche, specific searches. And in the era of voice search, ensuring products are optimised with accurate and specific descriptions is crucial.

The same approach is effective for product ads, too. Descriptions and targeting cues must be tailored to customers’ searches in order to generate the best results. While this might sound like a time-consuming task, the use of PPC software and analytics tools can help you to automate, test and adjust activity for optimum performance. For example, through use of dynamic ads, copy can be adjusted to ensure it is directly relevant and personal to each searcher to encourage click throughs and conversions.

Although Google remains the go-to search advertising platform, we always recommend running ads on Microsoft’s Bing platform too, as often, businesses find they generate better returns and require less budget. This is because Bing is much less competitive than Google, with fewer advertisers bidding for the same keyword, although search volumes remain attractive.

Similarly, with the rise of social media commerce, with Facebook Marketplace and Instagram Shopping leading the way, as well as Amazon advertising, businesses looking to capitalise on shifting search and shopping habits have a number of avenues to explore.

And while these tactics can help get products in front of customers in the increasingly competitive solution-led search environment, others, including retargeting, can then help to build brand awareness. This way, brands can capture customers who may have only been in the discovery or research phase when they were served the initial ad, as well as customers who may be ready to repurchase.

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Full circle

This solutions-based environment is similar to that of Ask Jeeves, or, as it is known today, Ask.com. The question answering business was a perfect example of how a search engine can cater to the needs of consumers and provide quick answers to their questions. However, it was launched ahead of its time.

It is interesting to see how this has now come full circle, with consumers needing quick and snappy results on-the-go, and Ask.com being perfectly positioned to cater to this need. AI has somewhat advanced this algorithmic model in today’s Google-led environment, but one could have imagined, in another time and place, that Ask could have been a pioneer in search-led advancement, rather than being the nostalgic afterthought it remains today.

This is also a prime example of the constantly evolving online market. What consumers need today might not be what they want tomorrow. Although unfortunate in the case of Ask.com, businesses that can stay ahead of the curve by paying close attention to changes in consumer behaviour are much better off than those that stay stagnant. And, brands, whatever their size or scale, should most certainly pay attention and align their product descriptions to fit a much more solutions-led environment.

But whilst adapting to changes, it’s important to never lose focus of the brand. Customers will always inherently look for trust in their purchases, and a simple flash offer is not enough to sway them away from a brand that deliver quality and confidence in its delivery.

Although non-branded searches are the trend today, any sustainable business must be backed by a strong brand – that’s one thing that will never change.

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The year 2020 has been a challenging one. The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically affected almost all industries. It is even estimated that by 2025, this terrible health problem will have cost the whole world between $16 trillion and $35 trillion.

Businesses all over the world have been heavily hit by the effects of numerous restrictive policies to control the spread of the virus. This is evidenced by the global economy shrinking by 4.4% in 2020 – the worst economic decline the modern world has seen since the Great Depression, which happened in the 1930s.

Fortunately, it looks like the world is slowly bouncing back from the pummeling it took in 2020. Businesses should be able to look at this economic recovery as an opportunity to ride the wave, so to speak. As businesses open, they will be keen on making up for the lost time. This is the time to strike.

AI and automation

Artificial intelligence and automation are very common items included in lists of modern business trends. Some would say they are no longer a trend but a reality enterprises have to live with. Still, it is worth mentioning and discussing the benefits they offer especially in terms of lead generation.

AI and automation in lead generation appear in different forms including conversational AI-powered chatbots that provide a more efficient way to sort out the multitude of first-time interactions with customers as well as automated email campaigns. Lead validation can also be automated through automatic AI-driven lead scoring and lead validation audits.

Ilan Kasan, Co-Founder and CEO of Exceed.ai, an AI-powered platform of virtual assistants that helps sales team nurture and qualify leads, had this to say in an interview with Hackernoon:

“AI Assistants can ensure that every lead is followed-up and nurtured. They can identify when a lead is ready to talk to a human, qualify it and even book a meeting directly on the rep’s calendar. All this happens automatically in the background, allowing reps to focus on what they like and know to do best… talk to prospects and close deals.”

Research presented in the Harvard Business Review cites a 50% lead generation increase, up to 60% cost reduction, and up to 70% decrease in call times attributable to the use of artificial intelligence and automation in sales and marketing. Platforms like Exceed.ai, which is advertised to lower customer acquisition costs by up to 70%, provide significant benefits enterprises cannot downplay and ignore.

Lead generation through social media

A recent study found that more than 50% of the world’s population is on social media. Businesses are missing a lot by not taking advantage of this avenue for a huge audience conveniently accessible online. Social media marketing, just like automation, seems hackneyed as far as trends are concerned, but it is still worth mentioning and emphasising.

A Social Media Lead Generation Report reveals that “the more the companies dedicate budget to social media, the more they are satisfied with their social media strategy”. The same study suggests that when sales and marketing use social media in lead generation at the same level, the satisfaction level in the lead generation strategy rises.

Just having a social media presence alone is not enough to generate leads with social media, though. To ensure that these platforms produce the outcomes expected of them, it is crucial to optimise social media profiles or pages by providing contact details and creating call-to-action buttons. Also, it greatly helps to have clickable content, user-friendly or intuitive landing pages, and suitable incentive programs such as contests, raffles, and discount codes.

Virtual events

Virtual events have shot up in popularity last year. While these types of events have already been growing in terms of popularity in the past years, the expected growth rate for it is almost 23.2% between 2020 to 2027. With safety still being top of mind for people, even among those who have already been vaccinated, expect growth to become even more significant for the foreseeable future. In fact, a study recently conducted by BrightTalk showed that as of September 2020, one-third of marketers surveyed now count virtual events as a key part of their overall marketing strategy.

Webinars, virtual networking, virtual classes, and other related online events are all effective ways of generating leads. You can use them to push thought leadership positioning for your company, present products and services, and, most importantly, interact directly with customers.

Another thing about these events is that it is highly cost-effective compared to doing these same activities physically. Hosting a seminar for a specific industry will entail more cost, more logistics, and a high level of coordination. A virtual event can achieve the same objectives at a fraction of the cost.

Gated content

One of the most effective lead generation magnets that can be done right now is to create attractive and compelling content and then put it behind a virtual gate. Free e-books, whitepapers, webinars, newsletters, and case studies are just some of the content formats that can attract a lot of attention, especially among enterprises that are looking for solutions to specific concerns.

Virtual gates can be used to ask for something from those who want to access certain content. Around 80% of content marketing assets that are geared towards the B2B sector are gated, and some 44% of B2B companies use this strategy to generate leads. Before they grant access to their content, they may ask for specific details like the business name, location, the reason for requesting access to the content, and other information useful for lead generation.

David Laxer, founder and CEO of The Brief Company, a global network of branding strategists, both endorses and warns about gated content, “Obviously gated content is an effective strategy for lead generation, but it can be counter-productive if the content isn’t satisfactory, or doesn’t follow on the promise that brought readers there. Your potential customers will feel cheated, and be much less likely to respond to future approaches from your brand.”

What makes it even better is that it also prequalifies the interested parties. If they can commit to this first step, then it is highly likely that they will proceed deeper into the conversion funnel. It will not be as difficult to convince them to inquire about product offerings and place orders.

It is advisable not to ask for too much information from prospects, though. Doing so can turn off these potential leads. Also, it is recommended to avoid having ads, especially those that keep repeating and require the full focus of the prospective leads.

The takeaway

The global pandemic created many challenges for businesses. But things are slowly going back to normal. Initiating lead generation strategies that are a complementary fit to the realities of the New Normal will ensure that your efforts will be met with successful leads that can be converted into sales for your business.

The best lead generation strategies at present are the ones that are strongly rooted in digital. From the use of AI and automation to social media marketing, gated content, and virtual events, the use of digital and online solutions is a reality enterprises should already be accustomed to by now. Mastering these is a must if businesses were to survive and thrive under a new business landscape.

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