SociallyMined

And what are those 4 tips, you ask? Here goes…

1.    Find your Audience. Many trade associations are on a tight budget and don’t have resources for a full time social media team. Often a trade association’s social media presence is just a placeholder and doesn’t provide strategic content to the right audience.

2.    Get out of your Comfort Zone. Video and mobile are scary words but you may have noticed that a lot of content on the interest is trending more visual. You may have also realized that more people are digesting content on their phones more than a traditional computer.

3.    Find your Influencers. Social media influencers can be big stars but sometimes smaller, less known people can be just as influential on social media for your issue or brand.

4.    Monitor your Sentiment. As a trade association, you are representing an entire industry to policy makers and the general public. It is important to monitor what people are saying about your industry.

As you might have guessed, SociallyMinded offers up a host of tools and resources to help organizations act on these tips. To learn more, click here.

The post SociallyMined Reveals Top 4 Branding Tips for Trade Associations to Start 2018 Right appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Two hundred marketing decision-makers in retail organizations participated in the study, showcasing what the company calls a continued increased investment in mobile marketing and, often, the challenge to quickly adapt to changing consumer demand.

And what did we learn?

The vast majority of retailers surveyed said they are increasing their investments in mobile (92 percent) or social media (89 percent) advertising this year, while simultaneously indicating they experience challenges in executing or successfully tracking ROI on these efforts. As consumers continue their adaption of mobile into every facet of the shopping journey, marketers are challenged to adapt strategies to better fit the mobile-minded consumer.

“Marketers should not underestimate the influence mobile marketing has on purchases made in all channels—in-store, online and on mobile devices,” said Marissa Tarleton, chief marketing officer for RetailMeNot, Inc. “Equally as important is the ability to attribute sales back to mobile marketing efforts. Because 90 percent of retail sales still occur in-store, mobile is the key to understanding digital attribution from online to offline.”

To review the study and its findings in full, click here.

The post RetailMeNot Reveals Retailers’ Hits and Misses in Mobile Marketing appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

But what about brands?

“We’re in the middle of the most massive media shift in history, and brands are lagging behind,” VentureBeat reports. “While 2.1 billion mobile users have downloaded over 350 billion apps, time on device grew 76 percent last year, and we are spending more time on our phones than watching TV, brands have yet to completely embrace mobile advertising.”

There’s evidence that some brands — including Disney, for example — are getting the hang of the new ecosystem.

“Disney discovered that with the right confluence of targeting and creative, outsized results can happen. The company achieved 7 times the average video ad engagement rate using smart audience targeting and great, interactive creative. And video ads already generate 5 times the engagement of static banner ads.”

Kroger has done likewise, recently scoring a 3.7-times increase in the number of customers visiting Kroger via a geotargeted mobile advertising campaign using factors like device data, location history, and offline purchase data.

The challenge for brands?

“The sheer complexity of the mobile ad ecosystem,” explains VentureBeat. “The number of calculations that go into which ads you see (on) Facebook or Draw Something is staggering, with easily 11 separate steps happening in milliseconds, and handoffs between ad networks, exchanges, demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, and data management platforms.”

To help brands get better at what’s inevitable — the massive move to mobile — Venture Beat’s VB Insight has created a report “on brands and mobile advertising that includes both the good (like the above examples) and the bad. There are five ways brands are failing at mobile advertising, and they include repurposing ads from other media, not using data, and using data inexpertly.”

Ready to read the report? You can access it here.

The post Brands Lagging Behind in the Massive Move to Mobile appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Over the last decade, Facebook has evolved from a small network of college students to a site with billions of users worldwide. Throughout this gradual change, marketers have taken advantage of the site’s loyal user base and wide reach. Soon, branded Facebook pages became the norm, and the typical news feed was filled with a mix of content created by friends, family and brands.

But, Facebook is hoping to take the site back to its roots by providing each user with an experience that is less commercialized. Facebook’s most recent algorithm update shows users content from the friends and family they interact with most on the site. The algorithm also favors visual posts and avoids pushing branded content to news feeds. While marketers may believe that this means the glory days of Facebook marketing are over, it doesn’t have to be that way. Rather than giving up, brands need to adjust their strategies to meet Facebook’s changing preferences.

Here are three Facebook features that marketers need to keep in mind when adjusting strategies for marketing campaigns:

Peer-to-peer sharing

Facebook favors user-generated content over posts that are created by a brand. So, a brand’s Facebook posts will show up in more news feeds and reach exponentially more consumers if users share them. To encourage sharing, brand posts should not be overly promotional, but should be compelling, timely and informative. Consumers are more likely to share something that tells a story and creates an experience.

Brands can also take advantage of the user-generated preference by encouraging users to post about their brand experience on their own. Offer incentives for consumers to post images of products or events related to your brand. Create hashtags that are timely and relevant to your consumers’ interests that will encourage them to post relevant content. Brands should plant the seed with their messaging, but let Facebook’s preference for user-generated content spread it throughout its network of billions of users.

Visual nature

Facebook will also push photos and videos to the tops of news feeds. The new layout displays photos much larger, creates collages of multiple photos posted by a user and automatically plays videos. Marketers should take advantage of this by posting more photos and videos along with the content they’re sharing on the site. In fact, marketers can generate up to 94 percent more views and significantly boost engagement levels by incorporating compelling visuals into their social posts.

And brands should make sure that this visual content has consistent branding and voice. Photos and visuals should always include a logo, hashtag or tagline to make sure that the brand messaging doesn’t get overshadowed as the content is shared from consumer to consumer. It’s easy for content to get lost among the noise created by Facebook’s billions of users each day.

Tagging

To expand reach, marketers should also take advantage of Facebook’s tagging feature. When a post is tagged, it links to specific user profiles and is then accessible by that user’s entire network. So, by tagging a few dozen consumers in a photo, it can reach tens of thousands more.

The tagging feature is also a great way to get more consumers to interact with your content. Since Facebook prohibits a brand from tagging consumers in posts, brands need to encourage followers to tag themselves or friends. For example, if a brand sponsors an event and posts an image of the event, that brand could offer incentives for consumers who were present to tag themselves. This forces consumers to visit your page, find the photo and tag themselves.

While many brands are worried that Facebook’s algorithm changes will prevent them from engaging with consumers in the same way, brands can actually take advantage of the site’s changes by implementing a proper social sharing strategy. By using branded visuals and encouraging tagging and peer-to-peer sharing, brands can still use Facebook to reach both current and new customers.

The post How Brands Can Revamp Facebook Strategies to Expand Reach appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Of course we all know that this isn’t exactly true. In fact, it’s usually just the opposite, explains Laura Walsh, a Digital Marketing Coordinator at Keystone Click in a recent commentary.

That being said, whether or not people are climbing over each other to open your emails doesn’t mean that you can’t still use them to brand your business. Email remains one of the best ways to brand your company, even in the face of stiff competition for user attention from tablets, laptops and smart phones.

Consistency is King

The most vital factor with digital marketing and advertising is consistency. It means having the same voice, colors, logos, content, graphics and so forth on everything and everywhere your company presents itself.

The best way to be consistent with email is to use a template because it will keep things like your layout, subject line, color and content as consistent as possible from message to message. Sending out your emails at the same time of day, and the same day of the week, every week is also extremely important in today’s nonstop marketing world. If your audience knows when your email will arrive, many of them will actually look forward to it.

Content is Queen

If consistency is the King, Content is definitely the Queen at his side. If your readers come to rely on your email messages for interesting, entertaining, educational or otherwise thought-provoking content, they will help to firmly brand your company as the “go to” company when a reader services that you provide (There is also the 70/20/10 Content rule, which you can read more about here).

Email is the Bridge

We talked about consistency and, if you are highly consistent in all of your marketing efforts your email messages will be the bridge to take people from their inbox to anywhere else that you’d like them to go. If you’ve done your job well it should be quite easy.

One of the best features of email is that it can be accessed on any computer device. If you put a high value on consistency, and provide excellent content, your email can be one of the most powerful branding tools that you have.

The post Turning Emails into Powerful Branding Tools appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

That should be a terrifying revelation for marketers.

In recent published piece from Fusion360 – a leading digital marketing agency based in Salt Lake City, Utah – author James O’Connor suggests that “Marketing no longer starts with the customer, it begins with the inside of an organization.”

O’Connor posits that though businesses “understand that digital marketing helps them, in-store experiences count as well — whether they be online or in real life.”

O’Connor believes one area of brand message dislocation resides in the realities that modern day consumers experience.

“Everyone has witnessed an advertisement that portrayed a message incongruous with the actual experience delivered by a brand,” O’Connor says. “A fast delivery is promised, but never actualized; the service is touted as reputable, but couldn’t be worse; being put on hold is a thing of the past, but you sit there lulled to sleep by elevator music. You are a long-lost customer, and at this point, you’re destined to seek a business that walks its talk. If the brandscape fosters lies and undelivered promises, no digital marketing strategy will be able to help it, no matter how creative your ideas are.”

Could that be one reason why employees don’t believe the brand messages touted by the marketing departments at their companies?

O’Connor cites the recent brand overhaul at UPS — an overhaul launched for just this very reason. UPS realized its internal operations and procedures hardly mirrored their customers’ experiences. Its brand — he says — “was slipping from the inside out.”

The improved customer service made UPS one of the Best Global Brands of 2012.

“They demonstrated how a brand is not a gimmick, but rather a promise meant to be kept at every level of interaction the consumer has with their logo,” writes O’Connor. “Although their avowed internal brand statement is much different than its external statement, “what can Brown do for you” is supported by what the employees see as important every day: “One brand, one company, one vision.”

The takeaway, O’Connor suggests, is that if companies “want to gain an advantage in the ever-increasing brand chaos that permeates media” they need to start internally.

To read the entire blog post, click here.

The post Better Branding: What Happens When Employees Don't Believe the Company Message? appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is an exclusive guest contribution from Amy Vale, VP of Global Research and Strategic Communications at Mojiva, Inc. (Mojiva and Mocean Mobile).

What makes a brand memorable? It’s a question that’s been asked by many marketers and one that I myself have faced in defining the branding strategy and positioning for two mobile brands – Mojiva and Mocean Mobile. Building one successful brand can be a gargantuan task for even the most adept marketing whiz; building two brands simultaneously, however, is another story.

Through it all, I’ve found myself looking to one brand that’s been a favorite of mine for years – Yves Saint Laurent. The brand’s marketing and creative teams have done an exceptional job in staying true and consistent to the brand over time, delivering an end-to-end brand experience that encompasses digital, in-store and everything in between, and cultivating brand loyalists who are ultimately fearless in defending every purchase made and being in-the-know about every single piece they own.

Just as YSL has taught me a few things over the years, I hope other marketers can learn from some of my own experiences. Here are five lessons that have helped me build two strong brands – simultaneously – from the ground up, in a noisy, crowded market.

Your customer drives your decisions. 

I don’t care what part of the business you sit in, whether it’s operations, technology, IT, sales, marketing or business development. A business is a business; the bottom line matters. It’s an easy and all too common mistake for business units to provide suggestions and forget that marketers are driven by results and ROI. If customers are responding to digital activities and finding value in blogs, or tweets, or webinars, then keep doing them. Consistently. Give them what THEY want. If you’re developing research, think about the type of content that’s relevant to your customer, not what your competitors are doing – unless it adds value. It doesn’t matter whether your brand is B2B or B2C because, at the end of the day, our job is to support the business in driving revenue and growing effectively.

Content is king.

I’m not the first person to say this, but yes, “Content is king.” Great content carries with it great power to both build relationships and drive sales. First, it’s important to know what constitutes great content. Is it unique? Does it reinforce your position as the go-to thought leader in the space? Does it demonstrate a clear stance on a debated topic? Does it differentiate you from competitors? Then you must add value. Don’t say something just to say it. Distribute all of your content across the right channels – research, e-newsletters, blogs, email marketing, videos and social media. Be strategic in both the type of content you produce and where each piece is released.

Go with your gut, not with the noise.

It’s really easy to get bogged down by the demands and requests of internal stakeholders. A sales deck request here, an event speaking opportunity request there, it happens a lot. The trick is not letting that noise overtake what you know to be the right approach. I’ve found more often than not, going with my gut pays off. Just make sure you always have a sound strategy to back up your thinking. “Because I said so,” is rarely well received.

Be in the know, but develop your own opinions.

Education is vital. Listen, absorb and learn as much as you can. Of course, that doesn’t mean those opinions should be taken as gospel. Be your own person, develop your own opinions and don’t be afraid to step out on the ledge with a less than popular view that could very well improve standards in the industry. Those who make themselves the outliers in a place where only “yes men” exist often find themselves being the ones who push an industry forward.

Be prepared to say “no” (a lot).

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that you can’t be afraid to hear or say the word “no.” It’s going to happen – a lot. I’d much rather say “no” to an opportunity than go into something half-cocked and lacking a substantial budget, resources and, most importantly, strategy to back it up and deliver results that count. The trick is to know how to deliver that two-letter word in a professional way by always backing it up with the reason. Again, “because I said so” will go down like a lead balloon. If all else fails and someone won’t take “no” for an answer, let them expend their energy, while you go and channel yours into something more productive.

About The Author

Amy Vale is VP of Global Research and Strategic Communications at Mojiva Inc., a leading global advertising display company with two successful brands – Mojiva and Mocean Mobile. Mojiva, the mobile ad network, reaches over 1.1 billion unique devices globally. Mocean Mobile, the mobile ad-serving platform, powers mobile revenue opportunities for publishers, developers, ad networks and app stores by giving them the ability to serve display ads to all mobile devices including smartphones and tablets. Follow Amy on Twitter at @AmyVale.

The post A Five-Point Plan for Building a Sturdy Brand appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Billed as the “largest market research of its kind,” Brand Satisfaction tracks every major brand on Facebook and how likely fans are to recommend those brands to others.

Brand Satisfaction provides marketing and insights professionals with access to hundreds of demographic, behavioral and attitudinal details about audiences they follow.

For its first study, Brand Satisfaction compiled millions of responses from Facebook Fans of over 15,000 Facebook pages to determine the Top 20 brands with the most loyal Fans.

The top 20 looks like this:

1. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
2. Facebook
3. Google
4. Walt Disney World
5. ALDI USA
6. Xbox
7. Starbucks Frappuccino
8. Google Chrome
9. Duncan Hines
10. Adobe Photoshop
11. Tim Hortons
12. Hershey’s
13. In-N-Out Burger
14. Dove Chocolates
15. NFL
16. Portillo’s
17. BRAVO
18. Disneyland
19. Dollar Tree
20. AMC Theatre

“Demographic and behavioral data is the cornerstone to understanding a brand’s Facebook audience and powering game-changing marketing decisions,” says David Guy, CEO of LoudDoor. “Rather than relying on highly subjective social chatter or experimental ‘listening’ technologies, Brand Satisfaction does the hard work of asking brands’ Fans directly about their attitudes, behaviors and motivations. We then package this powerful data in a simple dashboard interface to empower brands to harness their Facebook asset.”

Are you surprised by any names on the list?

The post Study Shows Strongest Brand Loyalty on Facebook appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Promising three days of “mobile marketing insights, collaboration and transformation,” the MMA says this year’s forum will deliver 115 speakers and more than 750 attendees. And the knowledgeable mobile marketing gurus in attendance will “share and generate insights that are transforming consumer engagement.”

In a press release issued Tuesday morning, the MMA said that its confirmed list of speakers extends to every conceivable segment of the mobile marketing ecosystem, including brands, agencies, wireless carriers, publishers and developers.

Google, GFK, Synovate, Zokem, InMobi, Adobe, Web Trends, Microsoft Advertising, Millennial Media, Out There Media, NHL, The Gap, American Express, Live Nation and numerous others will provide concrete evidence that mobile marketing works and is here to stay.

The MMA also confirmed today that the forum’s lineup includes:

• InMobi, Out There Media and others who will discuss consumer mobile commerce preferences
• Zokem who will present details on what consumers are doing with phones as seen through permission-based device metering.
• GfK will discuss the rich data sets available within carrier networkd and the opportunities for carrier engagement
• Synovate, Webtrends, Adobe and Motricity will discuss in their track, session, roundtable and panel respectively on what insights can be garnered from mobile consumer interactions
• And Truste, Microsoft, Acxiom and LCG will discuss the issues of consumer privacy and what brands, agencies and others can do with user data and the best practices for engaging consumers

“The most worthwhile events enable attendees to collaborate and share what they’ve learned, instead of just listening to someone talk,” says Michael Becker, MMA managing director for North America. “That’s why we’ve structured the MMA Forum to make it convenient for executives to exchange ideas, both during presentations and throughout the forum. It’s rare to have this many industry leaders and visionaries in one place, creating the kinds of networking and collaboration opportunities that have made the MMA Forum a must-attend event.”

Attendee registration and full agenda details for the event can be found by clicking here.

The post Mobile Marketing Association Gears Up for Next Week’s MMA Forum New York appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest post from Tony Nethercutt, General Manager, Mojiva.

Mobile technology will “mature”
Development of the mobile ecosystem has been a process, rather than “the moment we’ve all been waiting for.” Online advertising took the better part of a decade to establish itself and, within an astoundingly short period of time, mobile marketers are already able to do many of the things they can already do in online advertising: Location-based advertising? Check. Highly-targeted coupons? Check. Rich media creative? Check.

But, we’re only about 80 percent of the way there, mostly due to the fragmented nature of the industry by platform and device. But the audience will continue to grow and technology will continue to evolve to meet the demands of media buyers, in turn increasing the amount of ad spend that will support that progress.

Publishers and advertisers will take larger roles in the mobile space
If you’re a major media company and are not at least dipping your toes into mobile, what in the world are you waiting for? Your audience has become untethered and so should your content!

While some have begun development of their mobile content environment, others have gone all-in, most notably The Daily, a new iPad newspaper developed by News Corp. It will be the first of its kind, but certainly not the last — publishers will use this as a test case and develop their own strategies for their mobile content. For advertisers, this means that many more opportunities to put ad spend to good use.

Explosion of sophisticated ad units using video and rich media
This past Consumer Electronics Show gave us a glimpse into the future of mobile devices: big, bold and beautiful. Analysts are already seeing how big this can be — more than 50 million tablet devices will be sold in 2011, according to a recent study by Goldman Sachs. These larger mobile screens and more sophisticated hardware give marketers the chance to really make a splash with their creative, whether it is through video or additional rich media opportunities.

Mobile creative must, and will, adapt
Mobile ad strategies often do not take into account the mindset of a user who is online versus on their mobile phone: They are more “committed” when they are in front of computer, whereas mobile is more of a transactional, fast-paced relationship.

The advancement of tablet devices and netbooks toward mobile PCs blurs the line a bit, but the result still remains: Creative needs to be short, sharp and punchy to really take advantage of the medium.

No mo-bull
Advertisers will be spending close to $1 billion in 2011 according to the most recent predictions, which means they will want analytics to justify their ad spend. Greater transparency, and of course results, will be vital in order to continue giving confidence to brand clients that mobile is indeed where the action is at.

These are just a few of the exciting developments that are going on within the industry in 2011. The introduction of additional platforms and new devices introduces nearly endless possibilities for mobile marketing; with that said, let’s make it happen.

The post 2011 Mobile Marketing Outlook appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.