Dan Waugh, Comvita
Marketing is about creating emotive experiences with a product or service. Dan Waugh works for Comvita as a ICT / futurist.
Virtual reality enables you to create an emotive experience that’s better than video. Dan showed us a real video they shot in 360 video of Manuka bee hives to get experience as a test. They had 6 Go-Pro cameras on a helicopter. The test shoot showed it was possible.
Mark Pascall, 3Months
The more we transact with global databases the more vulnerable we all are to hacking. Local walled gardens of unique logins / byelaws and reputation management are challenges.
Blockchain allows a transfer of value to happen without a trusted middleman in a distributed ledger. Rooted in Bit Torrent peer to peer distribution, Everyone can become a node on the network. The genius of blockchain is to associate the P2P with a ledger. Its immutability is its strength. The ‘experiment’ worked – it’s unstoppable too.
The insight was to store non-transaction information. Anything that has importance to humankind e.g. birth and deaths. You want an un-hackable record. Insurance claims, house ownership, medical procedures, voting – are all projects going onto the blockchain now.
Ethereum is a new blockchain platform for smart business contracts that are set into the blockchain timeline. Ether is the currency that pays for contracts to go onto the Ethereum and they execute – nobody can block them.
DAO distributed autonomous organisation the first one is TheDAO who raised $150m from the crowd. The money started being siphoned out last weekend and everyone is watching…. the contracts are being executed but nobody knows where it’s going.
IOT (internet of things) that talk to the Ethereum network enables the disintermediation of merchants e.g. AirBnB. Users having control of their medical records could be a good blockchain application. Also cross-brand rewards loyalty cards bypassing the loyalty organisation.
A marketplace using smart contracts and enabled by bots buying and selling. IT could allow power / wealth / control to be more evenly distributed.
Richard Thompson, Kpex
New business 2015- a premium advertising exchange group owned by NZMe, Fairfax, Mediaworks and TVNZ with other inventory too. Kpex’s goal to protect premium advertising sites through programmatic. From Mad Men to Math Men
The new competitive set is social use (100% of the room) versus print newspaper readership (5%).
He sees his path to “wrestle control back” to enable publishers to compete credibly for the advertising dollar. Continuity plus change in media – high trust in old brands, TV is important news source and print employs most and generates the stories. Change in the old financial models not working, cultural change plus understanding the new audience habits.
He estimates that 90% of all advertising will flow programmatically within a decade of which the spend will grow 40% this year over 2015 to $21.5 Bn globally. The shift is from buying mass audiences to buying individuals and their actions. More focus on the “scalable audience of one” as the objective changing the message to match the audience.
It’s growing fast because buyers can buy efficiently, data and audience targeting plus avoidance of advert fraud from low quality websites.
- Good creative is as important as ever Many targeting points don’t mean you need lots of different creative variants. Seek the human truth across your brand – scale and effectiveness. Bring your agencies on the journey with you. Media agencies may lead but must bring creative agencies along. The creative is the single biggest factor on performance. (targeting is second)
- Environment still matters – surround yourself with quality content to aide view-ability
- Be smart with data and target at scale. Many small niche audiences with low $$ wastage is good but will not scale.
- Choose your partners wisely (self-referential!). Technology understanding is important, how does the agency set up their trading desk; how to structure your account.
- Know the market – it ebbs and flows and buying can be efficiently optimised to lower costs of sale. Start of month some people are resetting their budgets – towards the end of the quarter it can get expensive as budgets get spent.
Cassie Roma, Social Media for Air NZ
Air NZ is the country’s most-loved brand and so success is engagement, reach, community size. Goal is to be top 10 airline in social in the world (now 11th).
Show, Don’t Tell is the mantra.
Audiences growing Instagram is part of her brief. Images are crew, influences, causes they support. Facebook drives conversion and sales, Instagram is an oasis of brand. Audiences love plane porn!
Facebook focus is in the story we are telling – people first and the social side of social media. They joined Tinder as a brand for Valentine’s Day “Swipe Right, Take the Flight”. Video push with partner from movie Hunt for the Wilder People – we support kiwi artists – they spent $250 boosting the Facebook video.
The Safety Videos now are uploaded direct to Facebook (embedded player) before they used YouTube. Gee in the team is the Air New Zealand Fairy!
Twitter is very productive for brand, conversion and interaction – the cost per view in Twitter for video is sometimes is better than Facebook. It’s the first touchpoint for customer service. 8 team work 24/7 in customer support on Twitter.
Use #AirNZShareMe hashtag when you fly and the team re-shares customers’ pictures.
Snapchat is the place where it’s about a real true form of communication – quick and genuine. AirNZ use MishGuru to share Snapchat but it’s quick and fast and allows deep engagement – most engaged channel. Lots of User Generated Content UGC. Destination features on Snapchat quickly – can post a lot and not overwhelm.
Used social media influencers – Logan – his Kiwi OE on Snapchat – managed locally. Selfies are big and engaged stories are strong performers.
They give a big destination picture for #AirNZ/BrainTrust We know one thing about (Santa Monica) what do you know? Very successful content streams across channel. We go where people recommend and then mention them again.
Millennials – be relevant and genuine, know what you stand for, concentrate on the experience, make digital easy, influencers, make the journey one of self-actuation and self-discovery.
#AirlineWager agreed times of day when the teams would communicate online (not what we’d say). Ran for 2 weeks. and #projectblackout against the Quantas Instagram feed – use black emojis to comment or like their images.
Air NZ Social Team uses these tools
- SocialBakers for benchmarking against competitors, especially advertising and dashboards
- NetBase for Social Media Analytics, sentiment and mentions
- Conversocial to manage workflow between brand and social team
- Hootsuite to monitor live mentions
Monica Bloom, Getty Images USA
Zig when others Zag.
- Know your audience – pinpoint who will help you tell a new story in another way. What are their motivations?
- What are they doing that I’m not doing?
- Is this scary? (if it’s not you aren’t zigging!)
- Can we get this done without a committee?
The BEST conference wrap-ups engage
/0 Comments/in B2B, Conferences / Exhibitions /by Rebecca CaroeJust been to a conference and got sent the self-congratulatory showreel wrap up of vox-pops from speakers and attendees. 2 minutes of my life wasted.
Take a contrast for Conferenz and Spark’s CIO summit – a slide deck which has real insights and learnings which I can take away as a non-attendee.
The only thing they’re missing is a sign-up form to encourage me to ask for more information and an invite for next year’s event……
To be fair, they had a show reel too…. so not yet a perfect performance!
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Rocking Testimonials For Your Brand Profile
/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Case Studies, Marketing ideas /by Rebecca CaroeTestimonials are self-evidently a great way to win new clients and grow your business profile. If you want to consider adding them to your tactical marketing armoury, there are some prior considerations to resolve.
If you aren’t a long-established business, then it will be more difficult to encourage spontaneous outpourings of delight and joy.
Never fear, we’ve got a plan for you.
What’s already in the can?
Start with any existing documented positive feedback that you or your client can find. And plan
a page on your domain where you can drop in all the quotes from clients.
Make it easy to find e.g. www.yourdomain.co.nz/testimonials.
Make the most of the page so the viewer finds it a helpful resource, not a chore. Lay out the page so the most recent testimonial is at the top and the reader scrolls down to see others. If there are obvious different services or products which have received reviews, clearly separate them too. A series of embedded tabs can be a neat solution here.
Tabbed testimonials example
Starting from zero
A different opportunity exists for businesses without any rave reviews. You may feel it’s hard to ask for favours, to ask for sales or to ask for testimonials. Let us help you make it easy.
Business “workflows” are a trendy catchphrase that is a way of describing ‘how-we-do-things-round-here’. Any marketing activity which you do more than once deserves a workflow process. The reason is that it becomes part of normal business life and is easier to reproduce if you do it frequently.
Think about how you are going to set up the business process to get new testimonials regularly from clients and customers.
Here’s ours.
Our marketing meeting has “Testimonials” as an agenda item. We review a list of recent clients and pick a couple to approach. The lead person who works on the client phones up and asks (using a pre-agreed script) if we can have a testimonial. Further, we ask for it in three places – spoken, on LinkedIn and on Google. The spoken one we write down as we chat and then send back to the client for approval.
What’s so easy about this is that the client doesn’t have to actually write anything – they just talk. Most people find that easier.
Then we upload the testimonial or ask the client to do it on social pages. Interestingly, almost 88% of sales are influenced by social media and 59% of consumers say Facebook is the most influential. We also link back to the client’s website (like we do on the Creative Agency Secrets Testimonials page). It’s nice to give them back some strong SEO link juice.
Task completed!
Testimonials add to your SEO
Ask for testimonials on your Google My Business page. Note, you have to have a gmail address in order to create these so it can be a challenge for some clients if they have to create an account. The great output from this is that your testimonials are visible in public search (alongside the search map) and when you have over 5 published, you get a star rating too. That makes you stand out even more from competitors.
Get more mileage from each testimonial
Remember I suggested you get clients to ‘just talk’ and you write the testimonial? Well that chatting will almost certainly contain a lot of information. Take all your testimonials and copywrite a long and a short “sound bite” version of each. Put the short version on the website testimonials page. Copy the long version of each to a blog post – and link to it from the short version on the testimonials page. Creating on-site links is good (reduces bounce rate) and also helps show an expanded authentic “customer voice” to each one.
Gamification of testimonials
Inspired by Gabriel McIntyre’s “Getting Paid Faster with the Invoice Challenge”, we set about adapting it to suit our need for client testimonials. [Seriously, watch the video – it’s genius.]
Here’s the case study of the campaign we ran to get testimonials and support a good cause.
Now, where else can you get and share testimonials? We know they’re on Linked In, Facebook, Neighbourly (NZ local media), Yelp, Finda, Localist….. There are heaps of places – but don’t try to game the system. Just pick the site(s) you know your clients and prospects use.
Over to you to share your favourites.
This article was first written for publication in Marketing Online Magazine
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How to market validate a B2B startup
/0 Comments/in B2B, Strategy /by Rebecca CaroeCreative Agency Secrets are very practical and tactical marketers so in this answer we will give you a series of steps to run through. You will need to run through them all several times – for example, if you do 1,2,3 and it’s not working, go back to 1 and start again, improving each time.
You will need to be very self-critical in order to improve and if you have not got experience in B2B, we strongly recommend you find a mentor or coach who can be objective and help shortcut the number of iterations.
That should give you a methodology. Now you will need very strong copywriting, CRM and sales skills. Buy or hire these for your support team.
Good luck and happy to help further.
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Getting the best from Facebook updates for business
/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Social Media /by Rebecca CaroeBefore starting – cramped text and hyperlink not embedded
A quick tutorial showing good practice to encourage click throughs.
We start with a quick look at the “before” scenario. The text is continuous and the url (hidden in the image) is not embedding correctly. The post gets no clicks or click throughs to the website.
Type the URL first and then Facebook allows you to select the image you want.
Inserting blank lines in the text spaces it out & forces the See More link to appear
Moving forward to some of the resolutions – each one is explained in the caption.
Corrected hyperlinks to See More and site link.
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Fresh ideas for your digital marketing
/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Rebecca CaroeSelf-education is important in life and particularly in digital marketing. So many people tell us they “don’t know where to start” or “am I getting good advice?”. And so we always say, go and research the topic. Find out as much information as you can and become informed.
One way to shortcut this research process is to buy training or coaching from an expert and today we’re giving you the opportunity to buy a stack of tutorials in our best value online marketing education offer.
Our friends at Blogging Concentrated, Dan Morris and Rachel Martin have pulled together the BC Stack. It’s a one-off promotion for 7 days with a large number of products all for sale together for a single price of US$27 (approx NZ$37). We have contributed the Proactive B2B New Biz Toolkit to the stack.
Conrado has reviewed the full product list and summarised them into categories so you can appraise the area of most interest to yourself. All the names in bold are personally known to the CAS team.
#Content Marketing
#Social Media
#Affiliate Marketing
#Entrepreneurship
#Growth Hacking
#Leading Edge Tools
#Business To Business
#Productivity
#New Zealand Authors
The BC Stack offer runs from 28th June NZT until 2nd July NZT
[button_3 text=”order-now.png” align=”center” href=”http://bloggingconcentrated.com/members/aff/go/rcaroe/?i=34″ new_window=”Y”/]
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10 marketing strategies for a local business
/0 Comments/in B2C, Local Marketing, Marketing /by Rebecca CaroeGreat question – local marketing is absolutely essential nowadays. Especially as few people are navigating social media looking for tooth whitening services, these will become more profitable than online over time.
Here’s a quick list of tools I suggest using to bolster your current work.
I hope that gives you a load of great ideas to be getting on with.
But if you’d like specific coaching on what to do for this client – get in touch.
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In-House Vs. Freelance Writers: The Pros and Cons
/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Sudip MuttMarketers rely heavily on high-quality content to drive traffic to sites and landing pages and forge a strong relationship with their target market. And while lots of content is visual and auditory, like videos, infographics, photographs and podcasts, writers are still essential. Content writers don’t just work on blog posts and website content; they’re also needed to write compelling descriptions or explanations of the other content that you are sharing, like videos, and any other written copy that’s essential to encouraging interest in a product, like landing page sales pitches. Whether to hire an in-house writer or a freelancer is a bit of a debate between content marketers, so we’ve discussed some of the pros and cons.
Freelancer Vs In house
Pros of In-House – You’ve Always Got a Writer
Well, unless they hand in their notice, one of the most obvious pros of hiring an in-house writer is that you have a writer on your payroll. You can go to them in the office at any time of the working day and ask them to write something for you and since they’re right there, explaining to them what you want in person can be a lot easier than trying to make it make sense over an email. On the other hand, freelance writers often work for a variety of different clients so you might not always get an answer from them immediately and it might be necessary to wait a little longer to get your content.
Cons of In-House – It Can Get Expensive
Depending on the amount of writing that you need doing, hiring an in-house writer on a salary can get expensive compared to working with a freelancer, who’ll usually charge you only for the work he or she does. Unless you are churning out tons of written content on a day-to-day basis, hiring an in-house writer might be a totally unnecessary expense for your business.
Pros of Freelancers – You’ll Get More Choice
Contrary to hiring in-house, where you need to hope that there’s a talented writer looking for work in your local area, working with a freelancer means that you can choose from talented individuals across the country or even abroad. It’s not uncommon for freelancer writers to work with clients overseas, so your top writers could be a thousand miles away.
Cons of Freelancers – Communication Might Not Be as Easy
Tools like Slack, Zoom, Google Hangouts and even Skype have made it easier than ever to communicate with freelancers, so don’t think that communicating with your freelance writer is going to be hard – it probably won’t be. But bear in mind that if you’re working with a writer who sets their own hours, or is in a different time zone to yourself, they might not always be available at the times you want them to be, compared to an in-house writer. Of course, this can be made as easy as possible to deal with from the start by making your needs clear and working with a writer who can fill them.
So, there you have it – the pros and cons of hiring in-house and freelance writers. Which is the best option for your business?
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Digital Day Out #ddo16 conference notes
/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Rebecca CaroeDan Waugh, Comvita
Marketing is about creating emotive experiences with a product or service. Dan Waugh works for Comvita as a ICT / futurist.
Virtual reality enables you to create an emotive experience that’s better than video. Dan showed us a real video they shot in 360 video of Manuka bee hives to get experience as a test. They had 6 Go-Pro cameras on a helicopter. The test shoot showed it was possible.
Mark Pascall, 3Months
The more we transact with global databases the more vulnerable we all are to hacking. Local walled gardens of unique logins / byelaws and reputation management are challenges.
Blockchain allows a transfer of value to happen without a trusted middleman in a distributed ledger. Rooted in Bit Torrent peer to peer distribution, Everyone can become a node on the network. The genius of blockchain is to associate the P2P with a ledger. Its immutability is its strength. The ‘experiment’ worked – it’s unstoppable too.
The insight was to store non-transaction information. Anything that has importance to humankind e.g. birth and deaths. You want an un-hackable record. Insurance claims, house ownership, medical procedures, voting – are all projects going onto the blockchain now.
Ethereum is a new blockchain platform for smart business contracts that are set into the blockchain timeline. Ether is the currency that pays for contracts to go onto the Ethereum and they execute – nobody can block them.
DAO distributed autonomous organisation the first one is TheDAO who raised $150m from the crowd. The money started being siphoned out last weekend and everyone is watching…. the contracts are being executed but nobody knows where it’s going.
IOT (internet of things) that talk to the Ethereum network enables the disintermediation of merchants e.g. AirBnB. Users having control of their medical records could be a good blockchain application. Also cross-brand rewards loyalty cards bypassing the loyalty organisation.
A marketplace using smart contracts and enabled by bots buying and selling. IT could allow power / wealth / control to be more evenly distributed.
Richard Thompson, Kpex
New business 2015- a premium advertising exchange group owned by NZMe, Fairfax, Mediaworks and TVNZ with other inventory too. Kpex’s goal to protect premium advertising sites through programmatic. From Mad Men to Math Men
The new competitive set is social use (100% of the room) versus print newspaper readership (5%).
He sees his path to “wrestle control back” to enable publishers to compete credibly for the advertising dollar. Continuity plus change in media – high trust in old brands, TV is important news source and print employs most and generates the stories. Change in the old financial models not working, cultural change plus understanding the new audience habits.
He estimates that 90% of all advertising will flow programmatically within a decade of which the spend will grow 40% this year over 2015 to $21.5 Bn globally. The shift is from buying mass audiences to buying individuals and their actions. More focus on the “scalable audience of one” as the objective changing the message to match the audience.
It’s growing fast because buyers can buy efficiently, data and audience targeting plus avoidance of advert fraud from low quality websites.
Cassie Roma, Social Media for Air NZ
Air NZ is the country’s most-loved brand and so success is engagement, reach, community size. Goal is to be top 10 airline in social in the world (now 11th).
Show, Don’t Tell is the mantra.
Audiences growing Instagram is part of her brief. Images are crew, influences, causes they support. Facebook drives conversion and sales, Instagram is an oasis of brand. Audiences love plane porn!
Facebook focus is in the story we are telling – people first and the social side of social media. They joined Tinder as a brand for Valentine’s Day “Swipe Right, Take the Flight”. Video push with partner from movie Hunt for the Wilder People – we support kiwi artists – they spent $250 boosting the Facebook video.
The Safety Videos now are uploaded direct to Facebook (embedded player) before they used YouTube. Gee in the team is the Air New Zealand Fairy!
Twitter is very productive for brand, conversion and interaction – the cost per view in Twitter for video is sometimes is better than Facebook. It’s the first touchpoint for customer service. 8 team work 24/7 in customer support on Twitter.
Use #AirNZShareMe hashtag when you fly and the team re-shares customers’ pictures.
Snapchat is the place where it’s about a real true form of communication – quick and genuine. AirNZ use MishGuru to share Snapchat but it’s quick and fast and allows deep engagement – most engaged channel. Lots of User Generated Content UGC. Destination features on Snapchat quickly – can post a lot and not overwhelm.
Used social media influencers – Logan – his Kiwi OE on Snapchat – managed locally. Selfies are big and engaged stories are strong performers.
They give a big destination picture for #AirNZ/BrainTrust We know one thing about (Santa Monica) what do you know? Very successful content streams across channel. We go where people recommend and then mention them again.
Millennials – be relevant and genuine, know what you stand for, concentrate on the experience, make digital easy, influencers, make the journey one of self-actuation and self-discovery.
#AirlineWager agreed times of day when the teams would communicate online (not what we’d say). Ran for 2 weeks. and #projectblackout against the Quantas Instagram feed – use black emojis to comment or like their images.
Air NZ Social Team uses these tools
Monica Bloom, Getty Images USA
Zig when others Zag.
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How to get testimonials for your business
/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Case Studies, Marketing ideas /by Rebecca CaroeFirstly get a page set up on your domain where you can drop in all the quotes we get from clients.
Recommendations:
Here’s a case study of a cute campaign we ran to get testimonials and support a good cause.
Now, where else can you get testimonials….. Linked In, Facebook, Neighbourly (NZ local media), Yelp, Finda….. over to you to share yours.
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