Deliverability is a key virtue in managing and orchestrating a strategic email marketing campaign. Sean Brady, President of Americas at Emarsys, provides a background and discusses the importance of email delivery
From mobile and social media marketing to virtual and augmented reality, marketers today have a wide array of choices to reach target audiences. But ask any marketer to forego email marketing and they are sure to be displeased. By allowing marketers to send highly-targeted messages to large audiences with minimum manual effort and cost, email marketing still remains a top choice, as the channel is so effective. Marketers are likely to get nightmares with news such as Verizon’s recent decision to exit the email business from March 2017 and migrate 4.5 million of its customer email accounts over to AOL or other providers. Why? Because of the massive challenge it will pose from an email deliverability standpoint.


Email marketing, just like any other customer-facing technology, requires marketers to navigate complex, behind-the-scenes challenges to effectively reach the customer. A shift in any major email provider can have a strong impact on their customer contact list and effective delivery. Different email providers often also have varying backend architectures, and marketers must be cognizant of this to avoid email campaigns that end up in a customer’s spam folder. It is crucial for marketers to have in depth insight of the nuts and bolts of email delivery to truly understand how it could affect the success of their campaign strategy and execution.
A History Lesson on Spam
Over the years, the definition of deliverability has evolved in marketers’ vocabularies, from simply reaching the customer’s coveted inbox or dealing with an Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) technical hurdles during the early days, to a more complex subject today that enables marketers to create effective, replicable campaigns. Previously, when there were no laws or regulations to deal with marketing emails or spam, marketers implemented a ‘wild west’ approach, pushing unsolicited mail to primitive mail-server technologies that struggled to manage a huge email inflow.
Initial efforts from ISPs to tackle this challenge included filters to counteract spam and blacklists on keywords. However, spammers still managed to find loopholes that allowed them entry to an unsuspecting recipient’s inbox, leading to an increase in ‘false positives.’ To counter this, ISPs started interacting with Email Service Providers (ESP) to exempt reputed senders from getting falsely recognized as spammers. With email’s rapid growth from the mid-to-late 2000s, ISPs increasingly relied on automated technologies to navigate the increase in traffic, making the problem of spam increasingly worse.
The Arrival of Big Data and Sender Reputation
Eventually, responsibility for deliverability shifted from the ISP to the sender, leading to the evolution of authentication technologies, such as Sender Scores, DMARC (Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance), Sender Domains, and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail). Senders had to comply with all these mechanisms to gain entry to the inbox. However, the rise of these deliverability technologies crossed paths with the emergence of a phenomena that was here to stay - big data. 
ISPs leverage big data to strengthen their deliverability filters by capturing and analyzing the inbox metrics and activity of their contacts. To determine whether a recipient desires the marketer’s content, engagement metrics are employed to gauge the content’s outcome after landing in the inbox. These metrics include the number of emails from a sender that are moved to trash, the level of interaction from a recipient with the email (using clicks, replies or forwards), and if a sender has been added to the address book – validating the sender and future email content.
Return Path’s 2016 Deliverability Benchmark Report highlighted that one in five email messages fail to reach an inbox, indicating deliverability is still a problem for marketers, even as modern technologies continue to improve identification of desirable email content from spam.
Sender reputation is a massive deliverability consideration. Reports suggest that 83 percent of the time emails are not delivered to an inbox it’s targeting because of poor sender reputation. ISPs use sender reputation to rate brands and determine how well they are following the rules of the email game. Sender reputation includes many elements, such as mechanisms that meet technical requirements (DKIM), maintaining content-level compliance by balancing HTML and image use, gaining strong engagement rates, and the alacrity with which complaints and unsubscribe requests are handled. While marketers can track campaign engagement rates to address sender reputations, this can be a reactive and risky approach as any activities that warrant poor reputation could get a brand blacklisted, and the time and money involved to repair such damage can be significant.
Deliverability: A Part of your Core Strategy
By being proactive and making email deliverability a critical part of their overall campaign approach, marketers can tackle the daunting task of navigating various technologies and requirements to master email marketing. This can be achieved by correctly setting up the sending infrastructure, and implementing various authentication mechanisms to avoid email content from getting marked by spam tags. Templates should be made deliverability-proof by including footers with relevant privacy information, opt-out support and links that allow adding to the address book. Highly effective deliverability methodologies can also be applied to web resources by making the data-handling information transparent and simplifying a one-click unsubscribe functionality.
Marketers can also avoid high bounce or low engagement rates by setting up a database maintenance schedule that updates old or ill-maintained email lists. This can be achieved by relying on deliverability and engagement metrics that indicate which addresses reject email and need to be removed from the database. Marketers should maintain email quality by consistently using relevant subject lines, avoiding too much formatting, design and attachments, and using an email content checker that tracks at-risk content – allowing them to preempt deliverability issues.
Grabbing a rival’s market share is easy if marketers stay on top of the latest trends in email marketing, including advances in marketing automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence. These next-generation technologies provide marketers with the potential to create highly-personalized campaigns that are personalized for audiences at an individual level, with a potential to further categorize by location, demographics, transactional history and more. This level of customer information can help to create more effective strategic email marketing campaigns that are able to move beyond many of today’s existing challenges, including deliverability, and allow marketers to attain high reach and customer engagement.
Marketers today have to navigate a highly competitive and stressful marketplace that is abound with aggressive rivals, new technologies, multiple devices and screens, as well as demanding customers who desire the right message on a channel and at a time of their choosing. Email marketing offers very high ROI with its low labor and cost model and the potential to deliver advanced, personalized and replicable results. With solid preparation and a proactive approach to tackling deliverability issues, marketers can rely on email marketing to increase sales, and improve customer satisfaction and overall business success.

Source: https://www.martechadvisor.com/articles/email-marketing/master-class-for-marketers-how-critical-is-email-delivery/

Jet Blue, Waldorf Astoria, and Biotherm all use digital advertising as a way to reach consumers.
Companies spend a significant amount of time and money on advertising and marketing their brand’s products or services.
It used to be that when you advertised on offline channels like TV and print, you just hoped for the best in terms of results. Now, with digital marketing and digital advertising you can track and tweak your ads for better performance as often as you need to. Unlike old-fashioned advertising, what I love about the digital world is it's real time tracking. You can monitor and make improvements instantly, or adjust creative to a different media channel and that’s it—you’re done! This means you don’t have to shoot that commercial all over again if it’s not driving results, or you don’t need to re-create and republish a new print advertisement when you want to make a change. With digital advertising, you simply adjust the content as needed and you’re ready to go.
While the benefits of digital advertising can seem endless, as a brand how can you make sure you’re maximizing performance and boosting ROI? When implementing digital advertising campaigns, there are certain best practices to keep in mind to garner the best results possible. I’ve outlined these guidelines below and provided some simple steps to explain how these tactics can be integrated quickly and efficiently into your digital ad campaigns and day-to-day digital marketing:
Clear Calls-To-ActionBuy Now, Book A Flight, Request A Quote--Whatever next step you want the user to take (which is typically the objective of your campaign) should be vibrantly displayed in your content.
Every successful advertising campaign contains a clear and compelling call-to-action (CTA). This “button” tells the user what the next step is and is how they get from the advertisement back to your site, moving them further down the funnel and closer to the point of conversion.
When it comes to selecting a CTA, you want to focus on language that is relevant to your brand, service or products, and completely obvious to the user. Anything ambiguous can confuse the user, and even if they click on the CTA, arriving at an onsite page that doesn’t meet their expectations won’t result in a conversion. That being said, you want to avoid generic language like “learn more” or “read more”—while this can be relevant to what you’re promoting, it isn’t unique to your brand, or even your industry.


JetBlue uses language tailored to their industry and brand in their digital ads, as seen above.
In the example below, Sotheby’s has a beautiful digital ad campaign that promotes different destinations. The imagery is striking (another must-have for successful digital advertising), the text is readable, and it’s ultimately a clean design. However, there is no real CTA. As a user, I could of course click on the ad and be directed to their site, but there is no real incentive to do so and no real button showing me what step to take next. Simply adding a CTA button to this ad would likely improve the performance of these campaigns and result in higher conversions.


Compelling MessagingIt should come as no surprise that messaging is important. With any digital platform, messaging is critical as it’s the core communication with a potential customer. In terms of digital advertising, when you don’t have a ton of copy space or even time to capture user attention it’s important that messaging be compelling and, most importantly, succinct.
You lose the attention of most digital users in just a few seconds. That limited period of time is all that you have to capture interest. Stick to messaging that evokes emotion or encourages users to click through the ad, and keep it to just a short phrase. For many brands, this means highlighting their value proposition, showcasing their core values, or defining an incentive for the user.


In the example above, Biotherm incentivizes the experience for the potential customer. Their core message “Enjoy Free Shipping + 25% Off All Orders” captures the user’s attention and for someone already interested in their products, it’s likely to be that last added touch to convert. For all brands, this is an incredibly well done ad to take notes from. If you’re running a retargeting campaign where the user has already visited your site, for example, this type of incentivization could not only help you stay top of mind as the potential customer navigates other sites, but can serve as the final touchpoint before the user finally makes the purchase.
Designated Landing PagesWhatever the content you’re advertising is related to, you should always drive users to a page that is relevant to that content. This simple step will help to keep users on your site, offer a better user experience, and ultimately improve conversion rate.
If you’re an athletics brand and you’re advertising women’s running shoes in an AdWords campaign, sending users to your women’s running shoes page will help facilitate the conversion process. The more relevant the page is that you drive clicks to, the greater likelihood that the user will follow though and convert. After all, your advertisement has captured that user’s attention enough that they clicked on the ad, so the likelihood is they want more information pertaining to that specific subject – not general information you’d find about your brand and entire line of athletic attire on your homepage.


Sending users to your homepage instead of a designated landing page that is correlated to the particular campaign can be a costly mistake. Users generally won’t search your site for the item they’re looking for. As a brand, bringing the potential customer as close as possible to their unique needs and the point of conversion is not only the best approach, but also the best user experience.
Imagery MattersFor each of your digital campaigns, it’s essential that you think about where you’re serving users with these ads. The likelihood is that the ad will appear while the user is absorbing other content somewhere else online, so the way your ad appears visually is important.
Using high-quality imagery that is telling as to what the ad promotes is one of the most important features for all successful digital advertising campaigns. Failure to use imagery that is captivating or visually appealing doesn’t help capture the user’s attention. In the example below, Waldorf Astoria uses beautiful photos of their resorts to advertise to a targeted set of users. Not only does this stand out as the user scrolls through the page, it truly sparks interest.


For brands in the B2B space, or in industries where imagery may not be as “naturally” beautiful as a beachfront resort, there are still options. Focus on imagery that is bold, clean, and compelling. In a lot of ways, imagery should tell the story your brand is trying to convey and give the user a solid expectation of what you have to offer. This is especially important for new or potential customers who may not be familiar with your brand. If the imagery in your ads doesn’t stand out, they may not even recognize your brand or your products if they see them later on a different platform.
Test, Monitor, And Test AgainYou’ve probably heard it said many times, that for any marketing channel, testing the effectiveness of your efforts is important. When you’re running digital advertising campaigns, this is no exception. Without monitoring your campaigns, how are you able to identify areas to continue focusing on versus areas for improvement?
Sometimes, seemingly arbitrary factors like time of day, language choice, audience segment, or image selection can really play a role in the success of your campaigns. For that reason, it’s critical that you pay attention to these factors and monitor which campaigns have which varying elements. If you’re finding success with one campaign, or finding an alternate campaign to be less effective, don’t be afraid to change it. A/B testing with digital ads, where you test ads with varying content, can be incredibly valuable when determining which messaging or content resonates best with your audience—and often for reasons you can’t foresee.
Also, testing your ads before you implement them is critical. More times than I’d like, I’ve seen brands with fantastic ads pointing to the wrong pages, 404 pages, or with messaging targeted to an audience that I’m mistakenly segmented in. Take the time to make sure your ads appear as they should and direct users to the right pages. When little mistakes like this happen, not only have you wasted the resources spent for this particular campaign, you’ve also adversely impacted the user-experience. This extra moment of testing can save your company a lot of money in the long run.
Driving Results With Digital Ad Campaigns
In this day and age, digital advertising holds a ton of potential. For most brands, it’s one of the most effective ways to get your company, products or services in front of a qualified and targeted user. However, if you’re not following the right guidelines to make your digital advertising as impactful as possible, the likelihood is that you won’t garner the results you’d most like to see. Keep in mind the above tips when crafting your campaigns and optimizing your conversion rate.
To learn more about digital advertising and how to implement simple fixes that drive results, visit Blue Fountain Media online.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gabrielshaoolian/2017/04/24/5-digital-marketing-tips-to-increase-your-brands-growth-online-and-improve-ad-results/#28afbccd7494

Developing a successful digital marketing strategy is tough.
You want to make sure that the money you spend is spent wisely, and that you are getting the right message across to the right people. There are countless blogs and articles out there on what you SHOULD do, but to help you out we have a few handy tips here on what to AVOID when you are developing a digital marketing strategy.


Targeting everyoneIf you are trying to speak to everyone you’re going to miss everyone.
Don’t burn through your budget with ill-positioned ads online; think about what you want to say and how you’re going to say it. You need to be so switched on to who you want to speak to, where they hang out and what they want from your brand. Impressions are irrelevant when the people who are passively viewing your brand aren’t actively engaging with it. Leads are the metric you need to focus on here.
Using all the socialsAgain as we mentioned above, you don’t want to get onto every single social media channel and waste your time and energy creating content for a hundred different posts if THAT IS NOT WHERE YOU AUDIENCE IS. It’s vital that you understand where your audience hangs out and then you speak to them there. Sure, it’s great to get exposure, but if your audience is on Instagram then guess what? That’s where you should be too. Think about your brand, think about the effort and the time it takes to build what you want to say, and then use your time wisely.
Saying the same thing over and over againJust like a marriage, you have to keep things fresh and exciting - but with the same core message. Don’t fatigue your customers - keep things new and exciting, but familiar as well. 
Not split testingIf you don’t split test your messaging then guess what?
You have no idea how effective your campaign is! You cannot be 100% on what your audience is going to love - so test and then test again! Try a new colour, try a new image, try a new button or CTA - just test the information you’re putting out there. And then update your campaign accordingly. 
Focusing on your likesWoohoo - you got a hundred likes on a post.
But WHO CARES if out of those hundred none of them actually engaged with your special offer? You can’t get hung up on likes, because it’s all about engagement. This is key to the success of your digital marketing strategy and you must use split testing and appropriate targeting to get the best results.
Failing to planIf you aren’t planning for your digital marketing efforts and don’t have a strategy in place, how on earth are you expecting to get results? You must consider all of the possible ways in which you can succeed and then implement them through a concentrated digital marketing plan.
Did you find any of these surprising?
It’s not rocket science, is it?
And yet, it’s always the case that people will go into a digital marketing campaign without split testing in place, or without a proper plan, or by trying to reach too many people. Don’t be one of the ones who fails with their digital marketing! Get your game to the next level and implement these tips today.
Author Bio
Laura is a keen writer who loves nothing more than cuddling up with her three sausage dogs and reading a good article on the New York Times website. On her weekdays she works in a Digital Marketing Agency but on the weekends you’ll find her at the beach or in the mountains exploring a trail.

Source: http://www.tgdaily.com/enterprise/marketing-missteps-2017-what-to-avoid-when-developing-a-digital-marketing-strategy

If you running an online store or an offline business with some internet awareness, you might have heard of these terms Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, Online Marketing. Let’s dive in and understand Internet Marketing a little better.
Internet or Digital Marketing is a data oriented, result oriented (pay for your results) form of marketing. Digital Marketing is an umbrella term used for advertising or promoting brands or products by digital marketing companies by utilizing one or more digital marketing medium such as search engines, websites, online maps, social media websites, blogs, infographics, videos, mobile apps, email marketing and a ton more online tools. Some other mediums closely associated with digital marketing, include wireless messaging, mobile messaging apps, digital billboards, direct to home digital television and modern radio channels, etc.
The advancing human generations have found numerous ways of advertising online to the extent that one saying goes “The best minds of our generation are working on getting more people to engage with online ads”. Some of the most commonly used methods by digital marketing companies that are popular with a lot of advertisers are Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Social Media Optimization (SMO), Social Media Marketing (SMM), Content Marketing, Display Advertising, Email Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Marketing Automation, RSS Feeds and E-commerce Marketing.
Why is digital marketing important today?India has 100+ Cr active mobile phone connections in 2017 and 220 million users have a smartphone. The smartphone penetration rate stands at 30% today and is expected to shoot up rapidly due to affordable internet becoming a reality. Smartphones, Desktops, Laptops, Tablets have weaved a web around our life and this digital presence and attention is the main reason why digital marketing has become so essential for companies small, medium and large alike. An average person is expected to use social networking websites, use search engines and utilize at least 3-4 apps on his or her smartphone in a typical day. The time spent by users on digital media is increasing rapidly and is only expected to go one way i.e. upwards.
Internet has become an integral part of everyone’s lives today (More so in the metropolitan regions) and digital marketing has helped smaller companies catch up to the might of large corporations. A small business can utilize the same tools a large corporate would use and can target their market share using smart internet marketing techniques. With the advent of digital marketing, small companies now can use the tools to generate sales and create marketing processes that were hitherto the hegemony of corporations. Without a major call-center setup, every small business can now engage effectively with hundreds of customers from any part of the world without investing on setting up physical stores or branches in these locations.
What are the major differences between traditional and internet marketing?The whole purpose of advertising with both traditional and digital marketing is to help companies reach new consumers, deliver a brand’s message and create a recall value. While both marketing methods serve the same purpose, digital marketing is far cheaper, more precise, data driven and result oriented when compared with traditional advertising methods. Leading research firms have surveyed the length and breadth of the country and found that digital advertising for their products has saved more than 50-60% of marketing costs for companies. Companies that market their products and services online routinely describe successful campaigns by the percentage of traffic that gets converted into leads or sales. Without conversion, all the online traffic would equal a nought and all the marketing efforts would go down the drain.
Digital Marketing helps companies reach customers reach only the audiences that they want to target. For example, a business in website content creation based out of Hyderabad, India can use digital marketing to reach customers in the United States and United Kingdom and it won’t cost them a bomb. In fact, the return on investment on such advertising is huge and the upside is being recognized by many companies in India quickly. As digital marketing is completely data driven, the advertiser pays only when a certain action is taken a user and this benefits both the user and the companies vying for his/her attention because the cost is low. The advertising data in the digital world is measured in standard parameters such as Cost Per Click (CPC) or Pay Per Click (PPC) where the advertiser pays only when users click on a search or display ad and visit the advertiser’s website or app, Cost per Lead (CPL) where the advertiser pays only when a lead is generated and Cost Per View (CPV) pay only when someone views your video ad.
Traditional marketing methods such as Bill Boards require huge upfront investment and to analyze how many customers a business received because of a board is next to impossible. This is where Internet Marketing comes in. With Internet Marketing, companies can track the number of clicks for a website, leads generated through a campaign, reach of a particular advertisement and total revenue generated. The numbers play an important role in helping companies make informed and data driven decisions on their marketing budgets.
Although we have written extensively about the positive impact of digital advertising, we are not writing off traditional advertising. Traditional marketing still plays a major role in brand building exercises for a large number of companies. In cases where digital marketing has been used in tandem with traditional marketing, the results have been unbelievably fantastic. According to modern research, brand building exercise and advertising with specific call to actions on the internet creates a more recognized and personalized feeling towards a brand and the brand recall value increases multi-fold. The same research also observes, companies that set aside 40-50% of their budgets towards digital marketing with specific goals tend to have better results.
How can digital offer better ROIWith advanced tools at disposal, digital marketing companies optimize conversion rates to achieve maximum ROI’s for businesses. The campaigns can be run from as low as 500 Rs. a day (~ $ 10). Having specific objectives such as increase online sales, generate more leads, get more downloads for an app or increase website visitors helps digital marketers tailor campaigns towards achieving these goals set by clients.
This starts with tracking the number of conversions received on a particular website. Web experts install tracking codes into your website at crucial places according to set business objectives. This marks the conversion tracking readiness of a website. From this stage, important actions taken on your website can be tracked and can be reported. The next step is to track the developments and actions on a real time basis. As the old saying goes, information is only important as long as it is fresh. Having actionable, live data is essential for any digital marketing company to fine tune campaigns to suit the needs of every client. Few digital marketing companies provide real time analytics portals to clients for tracking their progress. The campaigns are optimized to obtain ROI’s that are more profitable than any other medium of advertising.
Campaign Rate Optimization is an important aspect of digital marketing that is often overlooked and less understood by many marketers. Converting passive website visitors to customers depends on tactical understanding of the website design, core deficiencies and effective changes that can lure customers back to the website.
Digital ad spends are currently at an all time high and rightly so because of the ROI’s that can be achieved. One of the author’s company’s clients spent 65,000 Rs. ($ 1,000) per month for 6 months on digital platforms and clocked 300% growth in revenues and ROI of 250% on ad spend. This is the case with the majority of the digital advertisers as the targeting is precise. Various objectives such as branding, clicks & conversions can be achieved with ‘push’ (activate a customer while not actively interested right now) or ‘pull’ (customers with live interest) strategies.
If you found this blog useful, give it a thumbs up and share with your friends

​Source: http://www.iamwire.com/2017/04/roi-digital-marketing/151261

E-commerce is at its peak. Online shopping has now become a norm. 91% of people search products and services online this is why it is essentially important to have an organized digital marketing strategy. Businessmen clearly knows the importance of marketing. In this technological era, there are hundreds of ways to advertise your product through digital means. But if you want to consider tools outside of the box, then Virtual Private Network (VPN) is the right one.
You must download the VPN program in order to gain a competitive edge. It allows you to connect to an offsite secure server send your traffic along a different route through that service. Encrypted data allows your data to remain protected and it will hide your IP address.


Here are some reasons why VPN is such an important tool for digital marketers.
Keep a look on competitor adsSpying on competitor ads is always essentially important for a digital marketer. Of course you do not want to steal their ideas but keeping a look on their strategies and what is working for them can enable you to make modifications to your marketing plans. This will enable you to devise a strategy for your website’s promotion.
However spying can be difficult at times. When you look at ads on content aggregators, they personalize them for you based on your previous engagements with them. Types of ad they show may not be same as to those other customers are exposed to. You cannot even see what brands are being promoted through advertisements in other cities. You can overcome such issues using VPN services.
Link buildingA digital marketer may build links for several clients using the same website. Unfortunately, some sites only allow one or few links from your profile page which prevents you from building links to different web properties.
The way out is to create multiple accounts. But the issue is that many websites will track IP addresses to prevent people from creating multiple accounts in short period of time.
VPN can be used to get rid of this issue. It can hide or change your IP address so you can create many profiles to enhance your digital marketing strategy.
SEO impactsWhen you are working with SEO, you want to see what the rankings really are. This has become a much difficult task since Google keeps making search results more personalized. Even the option is turned off, it can be a bit tricky. VPN can be useful here. When you search using a new IP address, the search settings are reset. It is unlikely that there are personalized results because the traffic is encrypted and different people searching same IP address would make Google assume that the results cannot be personalized.
SEO marketing professionals also work with sensitive and vulnerable accounts. You do not want the data to be damaged under any circumstances. VPN is the best solution to protect your data from prospective hackers. Encrypted connection will work in this case.
It will even give you better access for search results overseas. You will be able to see your page as a native which is the real key to SEO breakthrough. In this manner you can get to know the demands of potential customers and optimize accordingly. VPN lets you appear from a different location of server which helps to tackle the mentioned situation accordingly.
Conclusion
VPN is something that every digital marketer must avail. You can come out with different ways to leverage the facility. However there are few disadvantages if a bad VPN service is opted.

​Source: http://www.tgdaily.com/technology/why-do-digital-marketers-need-vpn

Now is the age of digital marketing, but that doesn't mean brick-and-mortar businesses can't keep up. Here are some tools that can be used by both online and offline businesses.

It’s easy to feel as if digital marketing platforms and big data tools are only useful for online businesses, but the fact of the matter is that even physical stores can extract value from the latest digital trends. They just have to be more strategic with how they do it.
Brick and mortar extracts value from digital toolsWhen you study the tumultuous relationship between brick and mortar and ecommerce, you can clearly see some distinct stages. At first, there was a sort of skepticism where brick-and-mortar retailers watched as entrepreneurs attempted to start selling online. The results were mixed and most physical retailers didn’t believe they had much to fear.
The second stage was one of rivalry. As ecommerce giants like eBay and Amazon began to really take off and thrive, brick and mortar businesses began to get a little uneasy. They suddenly saw the potential in ecommerce and realized that it could spell doom for in-store shopping. This created a riff between the two sides of the market and rivalry was at an all-time high.
The third stage was characterized by compromise. Major brick-and-mortar brands like Walmart, Target, Best Buy and Home Depot began developing online presences and started dipping their toes into the ecommerce waters. They discovered that it was possible to be profitable both online and offline.
Now, here we are in what some would classify as the fourth stage. Brick and mortar is experiencing a sort of resurgence and smaller companies — those not named Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, etc. — are realizing that there are options beyond investing in ecommerce. While that is an option, many physical retailers are choosing to stick with their core business while adopting some of the same digital marketing platforms and big data tools that online businesses have used to track behaviors, understand customers, enhance user experience and drive sales.
“We’re in a brick-and-mortar renaissance where retailers are fully recognizing their challenges and opportunities in stores,” Miami-area business expert Natalie Kotlyar says. “We’re seeing incredible tech innovations and enhancements finally reach the store, helping retailers realize true seamless omnichannel strategies. Those who aren’t keeping up risk being left behind.”
But it’s not just about omnichannel strategies. While some retailers are going this route, others are simply studying what ecommerce companies are doing and discovering ways to apply similar principles in their own businesses. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that, for the first time ever, some of those digital marketing platforms and big data tools that ecommerce companies have traditionally had the luxury of using are finally accessible to brick-and-mortar businesses.
4 ways physical retailers are using digital resourcesIt may seem strange that brick and mortar would come to rely on digital marketing and big data in order to thrive, but that’s the new world order. In order to be successful in 2017 and beyond, physical retailers must recognize and seize the opportunities given to them.
Having said that, let’s check out some of the specific ways brick-and-mortar businesses are using digital resources to thrive in today’s marketplace:
1. Study (foot) traffic numbersOnline business owners and digital marketers have long had access to robust tools that allow them to study website and landing page traffic numbers in an effort to understand where customers are coming from, when they’re visiting, and what they’re doing. Well, brick-and-mortar businesses now have tools that offer similar functionality.
Tools like SAP Digital Consumer Insight allow retailers to “access anonymized mobile data that shows how many consumers pass through a chosen location each hour and where they come from.”
With a tool like SAP Digital Consumer Insight, physical retailers are finally able to unlock mobile data and understand who’s visiting their stores, where they’re coming from, and how they compare to customers visiting other locations. This leads to better targeted advertising and more precise location planning (for future stores).
2. Change prices quicklyRapid, real-time price changes are something that ecommerce companies have had access to for years. As a matter of fact, Amazon has been said to implement as many as 2.5 million price changes per day. This helps them stay on top of demand and optimize prices to meet the changing needs and desires of customers.
Brick-and-mortar stores now have access to similar technology. Known as dynamic pricing or price intelligence software, physical retailers now have access to tools that allow them to adjust the price of an item in real-time. In fact, Walmart now changes the prices in its physical stores as often as 50,000 times per month. This is made possible through the use of digital signage software and predictive analytics.
3. Optimize in-store shopping experienceUser experience is a big buzzword in the online marketing world. Enhancing user experience on landing pages or product pages could mean the difference between a high bounce rate and a high conversion rate. And while it’s comparatively easy for digital marketers to track and improve user experience, brick-and-mortar companies have long been left in the dark in regards to how they can better understand how their customers shop. But this is all changing.
Nordstrom is one company leading the charge towards understanding how customers shop and using these insights to enhance what some would call the in-store “user experience.”
“The company uses big data to enhance customer experiences and is continually experimenting with data-driven initiatives,” says Trips Reddy, the customer marketing director at Umbel. “By using new technologies like sensors and Wi-Fi signals, the company tracks who comes to their stores, which parts of the store they visit, for how long, and other customer behaviors inside their stores.”
In much the same way that an ecommerce company would study the data and make functional and aesthetic changes to their site based on how customers interact with it, Nordstrom is beginning to tweak in-store layout and presentation after mining the data provided by these new technologies.
4. Improve customer serviceFor customers, one of the biggest benefits of shopping online is the ability to check online reviews, browse in-depth product descriptions, reference FAQ pages, and chat with company representatives. Finally, brick-and-mortar businesses have a way to improve customer service by using digital tools.
Neiman Marcus is one of the leaders in this area. “By using sensors to track customers throughout stores, their app lets them know about preferred sales associates currently in the store, store events, new products, promotions and the latest trends,” Reddy explains. “Customers can also select favorite products, make appointments, leave messages for associates and scan QR codes in the store to get product information.”
The future of brick and mortarThe future of brick and mortar is bright. That’s something that couldn’t have been said in full confidence five or ten years ago. But, when you consider that physical retailers finally have access to the same digital tools that ecommerce businesses have been using for years, it becomes clear that brick and mortar isn’t getting left in the dust any time soon.
As Kotlyar says, we’re in a brick-and-mortar “renaissance.” Technology has allowed for a rebirth of sorts and savvy retailers will seize the opportunity to grow their brands and reconnect with customers in meaningful ways.

​Source: http://www.cio.com/article/3190958/marketing/digital-marketing-and-data-tools-prove-valuable-for-brick-and-mortar-too.html

When you decide to hire a digital marketing agency, you will, by default, check their mastery of KISSmetrics, ability to drive traffic, and deliver engagement. You will even review their understanding of your domain and evaluate their pitch.
Because you are really smart, you will also consider other aspects like:

• Did the agency ask you the right questions?
• Have you heard excitement or buzz around their current clients?
• Do industry leaders or companies and entrepreneurs you admire hire this agency?

Is that enough? No, your due diligence is not complete. Ask yourself four more questions to avoid a potentially disastrous marriage partnership.
1. How Happy are Their Existing Clients? 
Always ask to speak to some current clients. Happy customers are more than willing to recommend an agency. Another way to gauge client satisfaction to see how well connected they are on social media, how often they have conversations on these platforms, and the rapport they share.
Here is some information you should be probing for:

• How do they manage the client-agency interface? Do they have well defined touch points, and clear briefing expectations?
• Do they like like true partners and take ownership of results?
• What is the average duration that clients stay with them?
• How much repeat business have they earned from existing clients?
• Has the size of their clients' accounts increased over time?

2. Do You Like Their Previous Work? 
Did any of their previous projects make you go, "Wow, that is cool"? Do you find yourself wishing, "Oh, we should have done that"? If you answer yes, chances are the agency is a good fit for you, because you are thinking along similar lines. You will enjoy building on each other's ideas, and hit a winning momentum. Definitely hire them.
3. Is There a Cultural Fit Between You and the Digital Marketing Agency? 
Committed to building a remote-first culture ? Believe in playing as hard as you work? Addicted to Slack, Hipchat, or Reddit? Prefer four-day workweeks, and just as comfortable pulling all nighters? Great. Check that your agency is too.
You and your digital marketing agency need to be able to keep pace with each other, stride for stride. The journey is more fun when it is shared with people who enjoy the same challenges you do. Seek out enthusiastic, quick learners, who make it easy for you to work with them.
4. How Important is Your Business to the Agency? 
You want a digital marketing agency that:

• Values ​​your business
• Makes it easy to cooperate
• Gives your brand the focus it needs

An agency with a gargantuan client list may not be what you really need. If the agency you choose is very large and has many big accounts, yours may get lost in the clutter. A smaller agency is more likely to be hungrier for your business and more motivated to help you achieve your marketing objectives.
Whatever size you prefer, choose an agency that does not make you fight for attention.
Once you have asked these four often unasked questions, and you find that the agency ticks all your boxes, sign the deal. Congratulations, you just avoided a partnership disaster!

​SOurce: http://www.josic.com/digital-marketing-4-often-unasked-questions-to-avoid-disastrous-agency-partnerships

Marketing clouds are beginning to look like rough weather for ad agencies and like silver linings for a host of others.
Salesforce is pouring cash into tech, including AI, in pursuit of category leader Adobe, and says its own four-year-old Marketing Cloud is on track to top $1 billion in revenue for the first time this year. An alliance of sorts is emerging between martech companies offering services in "the cloud" and the consultancies already gunning for agencies' clients. And tech is emboldening big marketers to see how far they can go without others' help.
Some agencies are responding by signing on to use the same cloud-based tech tools or, in some cases, by offering related consulting services themselves. Whichever faction best gives marketers what they want will hold the keys to the next stage in marketing.


"Agencies bring the context the CMO needs and have the potential to be the best orchestrator to help the CMO get the most out of a marketing cloud," said Martin Coady, executive director of marketing technology at digital agency VML. "However, most agencies don't currently have the depth in these technologies that the vendors and other partners have, nor the experience scaling operations that consultancies have."
Half of marketers aren't satisfied with their lead agency, according to a newly released report by Forrester, and 60% are open to working with consultancies like Deloitte and Accenture. At the same time, 21% of marketing budgets are already being sent to martech providers including Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce.
"If you look at a large legacy brand, the transformation doesn't happen if you just slap a piece of technology into it," said Suresh Vittal, VP-platforms and products at Adobe Marketing Cloud, which reported $1.6 billion in revenue last year. "You need to transform the business model and the skill set of the organization and how you think about the products you are building out, as well as the culture within the organization and what gets measured."
"Those things require more than technology," he added. "They require somebody who understands your industry and business process to be the change agent."


The core issue for marketers seeking a so-called digital transformation is getting a one-to-one, holistic view of their current and potential customers, without multiple layers of intermediaries. Audience segments and ho-hum targeting aren't enough for them. And forget embracing the digital duopoly of Google and Facebook, whose tight grip on data runs counter to marketers' surging demands for transparency.
"The impact on an agency, as brands wrap their heads around all of this, is the nature of their services is going to change," said Mark Singer, digital marketing agency lead at Deloitte Digital. The consultancy worked with Anheuser-Busch InBev on a digital transformation push that spanned 10 countries and 12 brands, using Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud products to do it.
"Brands are developing more direct relationships with consumers, and the nature of what agencies are doing is going to shift and match that model to take more of a direct role," Singer said.
That means agencies will need a greater variety of skill sets that include technical, operational, business and strategy arenas, according to Singer, who argued that those are precisely the areas where consultancies have an advantage.
Agencies are facing frantic activity by martech powers, as well. Salesforce is striving to close the gap with Adobe by going after clients that sell consumer products, not just business-to-business marketers.
Salesforce in 2015 invested in a relatively unknown agency, Overland Park, Kansas-based DEG Digital, whose clients include Walmart, Purina and AMCTheaters. Since receiving Salesforce backing, DEG has nearly doubled its revenue from $26.7 million to a projected $50 million this year.
Last summer, Salesforce spent $2.8 billion on DemandWare, a cloud-based e-commerce provider, to anchor a new Commerce Cloud. Last fall, it paid $700 million to snag data management platform Krux for its Marketing Cloud proper. The CRM powerhouse in March also bought its first agency, user experience company Sequence, whose clients include Apple, Best Buy and Chipotle.
Expanding AI
Salesforce plans to expand its months-old Einstein artificial intelligence product this year with predictive recommendations in mobile apps, meant to help marketers suggest the right offer at the right time, and image insights, designed to look at an image and determine the context. That could help a marketer reach out to someone who tweets an image of a damaged product but only says, "I'm not having a good day," for example.
"What fuels our growth is the breadth of our platform: sales, service, marketing, commerce and then our complimentary products like our analytics and IoT Cloud," said Eric Stahl, senior VP-product marketing at Salesforce. "What makes us different is we are integrating in one platform, one common identity, one customer experience as you transcend from marketing to sales to service."
Although agency holding companies like WPP and Publicis all use marketing cloud technology, they don't get to hold the data. And one could argue that whoever controls the data, controls the client or brand. Major tech powers like Salesforce are offering more and more pieces of the "stack" that marketers need to build, maintain and manage contact with consumers.
"With Krux, Salesforce can compete on a more equal footing with the other players and with the programmatic ecosystem, providing a bridge from its roots in CRM," said Mike Sands, CEO of the customer ID entity provider Signal. "The question for agencies will be whether Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle are friends or foes, as brands now have options, from planning to execution, from stack players that put them increasingly into a principal role within the media ecosystem."
Nestlé Waters North America Chief Marketing Officer Antonio Sciuto might tempt agencies to place tech in the "foe" category. He's using Salesforce's Marketing Cloud, partly at a "lab" housed in Salesforce's New York office where at least two Nestlé Waters employees work every day to collaborate with Salesforce staff, to pursue digital transformation. "The technology allows us to do more things in-house and rely way less on agencies," Sciuto said. "To win in this reality, you need to always start from the consumer understanding. Beyondthat, you will need technology. It is the key to really make things happen."
Sciuto said signing up for Salesforce's Marketing Cloud has eliminated his need to work with agencies that provide social media, community management and consumer market research services.
Few major brands are trying to do what Nestlé Waters is, which might have something to do with the complexity and investment required to pull it off. "It is very difficult, and I will say the job is not done," Sciuto said of integrating the marketer's data with Salesforce's Marketing Cloud. "We didn't think about why our data was dispersed with our creative agency, with our media agency and our social listening agency."
Although he declined to disclose more specific numbers, Sciuto said digital sales had increased 50% since Nestlé Waters began sending employees to the lab at Salesforce last July. It has been using Salesforce's Marketing Cloud since 2012.
In his case, Sciuto credits good technology, not consultancies, with the results he's seen so far. "The strength of good consultancies comes from deeper understanding of the business," he said. "In today's digital reality, the interdependencies between business opportunity and technology is so strong that it has become more difficult for consultants to add value."
VML, for its part, is busily making tech its friend. The agency uses Salesforce for its email marketing and is trying to give the company's Sales Cloud a more central role in managing new business and overall client engagement. It also provides its own level of consulting to CMOs. "We've taken the view this trend presents an opportunity to better serve our clients and the payoff is a better platform for us to engage with their customers," said Coady, the martech executive at VML.
"At a minimum, agencies need to either understand how to leverage this data to inform their consumer strategy and creative approaches or find a partner that fills that gap for them," he added.

​Source: http://adage.com/article/digital/market/308666/

Wait a minute, isn’t it only 2017?
You’re right, and 2017 is shaping up to be a big year for content marketing, but as fast as technology develops, it still takes a few years for trends to really take form. Google Glass seemed like a big deal at the time--until it wasn’t, and smart watches never grew to become the market dominators they were once forecasted to be.
At the same time, I remember seeing the flurry of posts calling for the death of SEO at the arrival of the Panda and Penguin updates, which played a major role in shaping SEO (but never came close to killing it).
So rather than taking a stab at the immediate repercussions and developments that may tweak your content marketing strategy this year, I want to look further into the future, where these trends and technologies will have had more time to manifest, so you can prepare for the bigger disruptions to come:
1. Augmented reality interactions.
Augmented reality had a big year in 2016, with Oculus Rift, Pokemon Go, and the announcement of Snapchat Spectacles (among other tech developments). But it’s still not popular or widespread enough for it to be categorized as a viable medium for content marketing. But now, all doubts about the technology’s future have been squashed, and brands will be racing to be among the first to leverage this new medium for their own purposes, whether that’s interactive advertising or new experiences for in-person customers.
2. A reshaping of SEO.
Unless you’ve been centering your business on an Amazon store or a similar eCommerce platform, most of your SEO efforts revolve around your website. This seems both intuitive and obvious; search engine results pages (SERPs) are basically giant lists of web pages, so the more visibility you get there, the better. However, we’re starting to see different kinds of entries in SERPs, and less exposure for websites in general. Knowledge Graph entries and rich answers are replacing traditional site entries, apps (including streaming app content) are rising in relevance, and of course, our digital assistants are parroting answers to us, eliminating the need to review an SERP. As these trends develop, users will still rely on search, but they’ll use it in entirely new ways—and the importance of website-specific optimization will begin to decline in favor of things like app SEO and optimization for rich answers.
3. Live video dominance.
Live video’s popularity isn’t exactly a secret, but there’s one thing holding it back from being a dominant form of content on the web: participation. Live videos, when available, attract a lot of user attention, but not enough brands have jumped on the trend. Part of this is due to the amount of planning necessary for a “successful” feed, and mobile data plans and Wi-Fi reliability may also enter into the equation. But by 2020, my guess is live video will stabilize as an available means of communication, and we’ll see it in higher demand and in more places—including search results.
4. A native advertising surge.
People hate advertisements. They’re tired of being bombarded with ad messages, they don’t like the idea of being persuaded, and they resent the big businesses that are trying to take their money. That’s why native advertising, which I view as a hybrid of traditional advertising and content marketing, is likely to constitute the majority of ad revenue online by 2020. Even traditional forms of advertising will work harder to “blend in” with the type of content that users expect to see in a given medium.


5. Content length extremes.
Currently, there’s a wide range of different-length content that can become popular. Short, medium, and long posts all have advantages and disadvantages, with long posts attracting more links, and short posts spreading faster and requiring less investment. By 2020, I imagine we’ll see more polarization toward content extremes; people who want deep, long content will want the deepest, longest content they can find, while anyone who wants a fast read will only consume content in bite-sized chunks. This will force most content marketers to rethink their direction, optimizing for one style over the other.
6. Higher social value.
We’ll also see a spike in the social value associated with the content we produce and share. Authorship is currently important, and influencer marketing yields fantastic results, but as corporate distrust grows and internet accessibility widens, it’s going to be even more important to know—personally—who you’re getting your content from. Individual personalities are going to make or break brands, and the value of a post can increase exponentially based on who writes or shares it.
7. Personal device interactions.
Voice search has exploded in popularity over the past five years or so, mostly because algorithms became good enough to actually understand what we’re saying. But we’re now starting to interact with our devices in new and uncharted ways; we’re having real, back-and-forth conversations with them, eliminating the need for screen-based or type-based interactions. By 2020, I believe this will give rise to new types of content that aren’t screen-based; podcasts are an interesting start, but in the future, more conversational, interactive forms of content will be in demand.
Though some of these predictions are speculative, the majority of them are end-game visions of trends that have already begun. If you have a good rhythm, it’s a good idea to maintain it; there’s no use scrapping your strategy and rebuilding from scratch for concepts that are only now coming into fruition.
Still, it pays to think ahead; the most successful content marketers tend to be the ones who beat their competitors to market, so there’s definitely a value in early adoption.

​Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2017/04/13/7-predictions-for-the-shape-of-content-marketing-in-2020/2/#687045123064