Latest trends in digital marketing and should you jump on the bandwagon

The digital marketing trends have been changing through the years for several reasons such as participants changing behavior and technologic advances. The trends for this year will be central to one theme: user presence.
The trends before were about getting the customer attention no matter what and try to make them buy a product in any way, but participants have become immune to these strategies they no longer seek for information, they expect information to be integrated into their everyday lives. Knowing this the new trends go around facebook campaigns (social media) and location-based advertising.
Here are five digital marketing trends to watch as the year unfolds according to Ashley Brown.

1.Group Messaging
Group messaging has undoubtedly become this year’s location-based service. The clear front-runners are Beluga and GroupMe, both of which offer users a way to communicate in small, personalized groups of friends. So, how does this tie into marketing strategies?
What more can you ask for as a business than to have groups of customers already populated and organized by interest, age and location? The data that these groups provide is invaluable. Much like location-based marketing campaigns in 2010, marketers will be anxious to find ways to integrate messaging and purchase points into groups.

2. Reputation Engines
Somewhere along the way, professional networks have begun to exist upon a foundation of trivial metrics. Our everyday lives have become inundated by these reputation engines: mayorships on Foursquare, the velocity of one’s HurricaneParty, number of followers on Twitter, etc.
Several recent companies such as BranchOut, Honestly.com (formerly Unvarnished) and Hashable, have attempted to bridge the gap between real-world reputation and online marks, but it is unclear whether or not these companies will successfully convey the appropriate balance.
Marketers would be wise to turn to a keen eye toward these networks because they represent the base of influence, both online and offline. Whether or not the algorithms are perfect, each social network exists to harness the power of relationships forged in real life — and serves as a prime audience for marketing.

3.QR Codes
Ok, so QR codes really aren’t new. Businesses have been generating QR codes for marketing purposes for several years now. But I have a confession to make — I simply do not understand the success of QR codes.
The technology itself is rather trivial and has been around for more than a decade, even though QR codes penetrated the mainstream market pretty recently. For example, on a recent shopping trip to Sephora, I noticed the use of QR codes to collect additional information about products around the store. Considering I am admittedly secluded within the tech industry, I was anxious to know just how successful a somewhat “nerdy” marketing gimmick could be on the average, everyday consumer. So, I quickly asked a nearby sales clerk, “How many shoppers do you generally see scanning your QR codes each day?” Her response: “What is a QR code?”
Now, it’s obviously not fair to judge an entire strategy on a single participant, but this is where my own confusion lies. QR codes are everywhere. And yet, it’s as though consumers simply decided not to question them. Has this been your experience?
Regardless of how many scans a QR code will garner, it certainly appears that we will see an increasing use of them in 2011.

4. Startups for Startups
A few months ago, a startup received more than 10,000 signups within two days, without ever disclosing what it even does. And thanks to LaunchRock, companies can now create a no-fuss landing page for their business in a matter of minutes, thus initiating the single-most meta business model I have seen this year. These companies collect user contact information, promising access to their beta if they agree to publicize their own sign-up.
Which begs the question, how much information is really necessary to market to an audience? Not much it seems.
Users are hungry to be early adopters. Even mainstream users are becoming increasingly savvy to the newest thing -– tech is sexy again, and smart marketers know this. In 2011, I expect to see similar efforts that reflect this startups for startups meme. Everyone wants a piece of the startup pie and schemes like Launchrock are certainly a great way to gain attention and gather data.

5. Q&A Sites
Quora, a Q&A site launched in 2009, has mostly attracted the attention of the technology and media industries, but it will likely inspire mainstream marketers soon. The site, along with some of its competitors, has become a useful marketing tool. The Q&A space is quickly heating up, with influential organizations like TED and Facebook getting into the space.
Q&A sites provide a platform where users can engage in simple dialogue pertaining to any question — businesses have the ability to seed questions, interject into negative discussions, establish credibility and respond to competitor questions.
Much like a company blog that is built to drive conversation around a particular brand and industry, businesses will continue to find avenues to market to targeted audiences, such as those found within each Quora topic.

Marketing strategy in 2011 evolves directly from the location-based marketing of 2010. We have found that messages are most successfully communicated to audiences that have already coalesced around common bonds.
What do you think? Will you be more likely to engage with brands that market through the aforementioned channels?

YOU ARE HIRED!

To win a pitch you will need to use your two sides of the brain, the artistic one and the scientific one. The last one needs to be use because you will obviously need an achievable and structured strategy to win, but this ‘scientific method’ has to be creative and linked with your creative side. It is like when you go to your doctor, He or she will be very scientific but at the same time showing his or her humane side while curing or fixing any problem you might have. You will do the same in another context of course. You will provide the client with creative strategies in order to solve their problem.

Here are some tips you might consider useful for a successful pitch.

1) If you can’t win you shouldn’t be in

· Assess your chances before taking part in a project and the pitching

2) Pitch only the work you really want or like

3) Money

· Remember to stick to the budget, clients have one and they usually wont consider going over their budget

4) Pitching skills

· Presentation skills, communication skills

5) Truth

· Tell the truth to the clients, you will instantly become believable

6) Don’t B.S clients

· Pitch with the truth and avoid talking more than you need to

7) Be different

· You will probably be competing with other agencies to win the client. Therefore you need to differentiate from others

8) Creative solution

· Creativity is important to differentiate yourself, but it also has to be part of the solution

9) Chemistry

· In the pitch, true team chemistry is not just how you appear, but the small changes that you go through in the room while you are pitching.

· It is the changeovers, the reactions, the subtleties and the way you bounce off each other, that counts!

Other things to consider is the feeling you want to leave your audience with, you need to cause action in order to produce reaction from your client. Make them think, challenge their beliefs, prove how your strategy can work, show them your potential and… YOU WILL BE HIRED!

`TRAFFIC TRAFFIC ‘

All right, so it is time to look back and see what is happening with your site. If you want to encourage users to visit your site, to become loyal and have satisfied participants you will need to take into account a number of stages such as:

Goal setting, this element is all about what do you want to achieve. Is it more views, more buyers, more participation, etc. It is up to you!

Performance measurement and performance diagnosis are the “what’s happening” stage, ‘who' is participating, when and how!

Corrective action, this step is about what will your strategy be to correct or improve your actions.

One of the most common mistakes that is often make when building an online advertising campaign is to send all users to the main page (the home) of the advertiser's site. There, people often get lost and not know where to find the action that came looking for when they saw the ad. Therefore, it is advisable to build what are called "landing pages", pages specifically designed for traffic related to a particular topic. The most experts generally build landing pages for specific campaigns. But if you are not that much of an expert yet or if you don’t have the resources to do so, it doesn’t matter; at least make sure each ad directs traffic to the site more relevant in relation to it. If you run a selling electronics site and your group of ads talk about Dell laptops, then you should try to direct the participants directly into the Dell laptops page. Also your ads should be as specific as possible: by product line, by brand, by model, and the maximum combinations of them that you can find.

Include brand names in your keywords in general people think much in terms of brands. And when people think about brands, they are probably thinking about buying. Those are the people we want to reach. The use of keywords is a very effective way to increase the number of visits to your site. To measure how is your campaign going you have a variety of tools, such as Google analytics, Microsoft ad centre analytics, Google website optimizer, Piwik, among others.

And remember that Optimization tools and review will make your ad even more attractive to advertisers and this will lift your campaign performance significantly, and then you'll be on the road to a better campaign performance.

http://tools.seobook.com/analytics-tools/https://adcenterhelp.microsoft.com/Help.aspx?market=en-US&project=adCenter_live_Std&querytype=topic&query=MOONSHOT_CONC_AboutImprovingCampaignPerformance.htm

How to engage your audience to create deeper relationships:

Just like in any other relationships of our lives, in selling a product we have to follow certain steps in order to engage our audience and to create deeper relationships. We have to understand that we are building a friendship with our audience and how do you maintain your friends engage with you? The same steps you follow in your daily live without knowing, you will follow for your digital marketing strategy

1step:

Know who your friends will be:

-Research about what your audience is looking at, what web sites and social media are they visiting.

-You can do this with the research tools

-Once you find out what are they doing while on-line, make a list of the places where you find the greatest representation of your target audience and then you are ready to start

Step 2:

Make yourself interesting:

-Create an interesting memorable profile.

-Set up an engaging presence that builds trust.

-Remember to include your logo, a pitch-free description of your organization and your web site URL

Step3:

Listen to your friends:

-Before you take action, spend some time reading what they are talking about, their topics, their problems, products or services.

-By listening you will know the tone they are using and you can jump in the conversation with the same tone

Step 4:

Build your friendship:

-Engage with your market

-Take time to understand why they visit certain web sites or social sites.

- Don’t try to sell them your product directly; this will only scared them away

Step 5:

Give them what they want:

-Give them the info they are looking for

-Give expert advice

-Share thought about your industry

-Be transparent about your company information and mission

-Communicate with some selected marketing information.

Let them know about your products

-Provide great customer feedback

-Tell them stories

-Encourage feedback and research your market

Step 6:

Let them be part of you!:

-Let them get involved by voting, sharing, comment.

-Let them create the content

And don’t forget it always have to be:

-Educational

-Informative

-Supportive of creativity

-Aesthetically pleasing

-Rewarding

-Satisfying

-Helpful

-Easy to remember

-Easy to learn

-Have good utility

-Effective to use

-Efficient to use

http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/How_to_Engage_Your_Audience.html

How to deliver projects on brief, on time & on budget:

Businesses of all sizes embark themselves on thousands of projects each year for new products and services. Unfortunately, most of them are doomed to fail immediately, or at launch, because the original criteria of success were not met. Some project failures lead to delayed product launches. Such as the Airbus A380, others like the Big Dig in Boston, that went way over the budget. These examples, as well as the results of survey after survey shows that some businesses have not been able to figure out how to consistently get the products and services delivered on brief, on time and on budget with the highest quality. The risk of the failure is that the projects can result in lost profits and lost customers.

For approved projects, managers must work within strict budget limitations with marginal room for error. The dirty little secret is that projects are rarely delivered on budget. Poor planning, resource distractions, and scope creep almost always see to that.

Therefore here are my 8 steps to deliver a project on brief, on time and on budget

1) Listen to your client

-Listen carefully to your clients wants and needs so you can after make them match with the customer’s wants and needs

-The client will decide if the project goes or not, so be very aware of what they are looking for

2) Ready to deliver?

-You need to know where you are to know where you are going

-Define what will be included and what won’t be. Create the MoSCoW list. (Must, should, could, would)

-Get your business and IT teams ready for the action

-These will allow you to estimate resource, needs, costs and time lines

3) What if it is not working?

-Establish a strict change control

-In this stage the “must-haves” and the “nice-to-haves” list can lead you to failure if you are not realistic when making it

-Make sure that the list stays in budget

-Be ready to change strategies if they are not working for you or for the client

4) Cheer them up!

-Motivate your teams

-Define tasks and responsibilities

-Set reasonable expectations

5) Divide the project plan

-Create smaller projects within the plan that your team is working on

-Set small deadlines

-Be disciplined and work methodically towards the end

6) Train your team early

-If your IT and business teams don’t fully understand a new program or application, the project will be in jeopardy

-You need to train them before and regularly during the project development in order to be successful in the deliverance

7) Test, test and test!

-Test early and often

-Testing is the best way to uncover and correct errors

-You can use:

*Usability labs

*Focus groups or online surveys

*One on One

*Journey tracking

*Task completion test

8) Be adjustable

-There is more than one way to reach the goal, so be prepared and willing to make the necessary changes to deliver your project on brief, on time and on budget.

-If your project involves creating a web site don’t forget to see your checklist to make sure you tick them all!

-Checklist:

-Educational

-Informative

-Supportive of creativity

-Aesthetically pleasing

-Rewarding

-Satisfying

-Helpful

-Easy to remember

-Easy to learn

-Have good utility

-Effective to use

-Efficient to use

You must also always take into account, during your project development the Legal considerations such as:-Privacy and data protection

-Accessibility

-Copyright

-Service Contract

-Defamation

-Tax

-Suppliers and SLAs

-Client/agency

And for last GOOD LUCK!

References:

http://blog.method123.com/2008/08/20/deliver-projects-successfully/

http://www.mymanagementguide.com/project-delivery-management-tips-how-to-deliver-projects-successfully/

Here's my favourite digital marketing creative ever and why

“Reasons to believe” Coca-Cola ad:

I like this ad first all because of its message, I believe it is really well structured because it appeals to people’s emotions; they talk about a current topic which is world crisis in every sense, political, economical and social. Also the use of kids in this ad works in making you feel full of hope. The ad portraits a positive image of the brand, it portraits coca-cola as a brand for the people and as a way of sharing the good things of live. I also believe that the ad does not have a specific target, by this I mean, that the ad is made for everybody, even if you don’t drink coca-cola you will fell identify by this commercial because of the current topic they touch. Another interesting and efficient element is the channel mix they used, this commercial is shown on TV, facebook (social networks) and you can also find it in the SEO channels. As I said in my previous posts I believe that a channel mix is the best marketing strategy because it has more reach than just using one channel.

Another important element is the creativity of this ad. I see it creative in the fact that they put kids singing while images of the bad things that happen in the world are juxtaposition by the good ones, which in fact are more.

The success of this ad, and of most of the coca-cola ads, is that it has value for the consumer, it meets their wants and needs and it is also successful for the channel mix strategy.

Channels to reach Digital Natives

How to select the most appropriate channels to reach digital natives?

Choosing channels is always an important step in a digital marketing strategy and also in a traditional one. The channels are the medium through where we will promote the product, brand, etc. Since there is a broad quantity of channels you will want to narrow down the ones that are really useful and the ones that met your SMART objectives. Remember quality matters more than quantity.

In this case I will talk about the useful channels to reach a specific audience that is the digital natives, these audience enjoy and know everything about the digital era. They live and breathe digital.

Criteria for choosing:

-Audience: In this case we already know which audience we want to engage. And it is the digital natives.

-Budget: You really need to know how much money you are willing to spend in your digital marketing strategy, don’t be fooled by the fact that creating a web site or setting a twitter account is free, this tools need constant maintenance and you will probably have to pay for someone to do this.

-Reach: You will want to know the reach of your strategy in terms of audience and customer analysis.

-Measurability: You will need to measure how well is the strategy going, how much traffic is your web site receiving or how many tweets have you got. You will also take into account the participants insights by using the research tools available for this.

-Conversion: is about what your participant will find in your site, for example. If the participant goes to your web site and he doesn’t find what he is looking he will go away in a few seconds and might not come back.

Despite the fact that choosing channels for a digital Marketing strategy is extremely linked to what your objectives are I am going to give some examples of the channels that I think suit better for the digital natives.

Following the journey that the participants make when they get online makes it easier for you to know exactly what they want or what their online behavior is, facilitating your strategy so it can met their needs.

Channels for Acquisition:

-Acquisition is about building traffic to your site.

Useful channels:

-SEO (search engine optimization) Google

-SEM (Search engine marketing) Google, yahoo, bing

-Online Ads

-PR (public relations)

-Mobile

Engage:

-It is all about the experience the audience get. Make them feel like participants not viewers. You need to involve them with your site, let them share, vote, explore. It is everything about how you present your content to create value for your customers.

-Social networks

-Personalized e-mails

-Customer service and support

-E-newsletters and promotional e-mails

Remember! Is not only about building but also about maintaining, Optimizations always have to play an important role. You need to test, learn, adapt, update and monitor your channels.

http://www.cim.co.uk/mycim/Files/Digital%20Engagement.pdf

http://www.smartinsights.com/