4 ways to take advantage of the new age of marketing

Maximise your company’s potential with these strategies

TV, print and billboard ads were once the gold standard for marketing. Basically, companies pushed their name in front of the masses in an attempt to build brand awareness.

But now customers want personalised, one-on-one interactions with brands, and marketers are beginning to see how a targetted approach can stretch their marketing dollars further and generate leads faster. This changes everything.

Print, radio and Super Bowl commercials — there’s only one reason companies spend money on these marketing methods: bragging rights. They have little to do with actual branding and lead generation.

Also Read: 5 ways to know if someone is your perfect co-founder

But you probably knew that. What you may not realise is that many startups still use techniques that seem hyper-personal and new, but actually don’t move the needle for their companies. Here are some conventional methods that are missing the mark

• Cold calls: Although the B2C world has long rejected this method, B2B companies are discovering the faults in this strategy too. Buyers want to establish their own solutions and work out their issues online. Marketers need to offer as much information as possible online, or potential clients will find a competitor that does.


• Blast emails: Many people still swear by email marketing. But a mass-delivered message just doesn’t work for most companies — even if it’s delivered by email. One message can never resonate with a general audience.

Join the new marketing era
Every successful marketing trend these days stems from knowing your customers, where they congregate, and how they form trust. Marketers no longer “think” of campaigns; they build them around buyer needs. Personalisation has become the key to generating RoI for your marketing efforts.

Knowing your buyer is the most effective marketing tool you can have. Start with customer profiles and dig deep into who your customers are to figure out how to reach them.

Once you understand your customers, consider these marketing tips to make your strategy work harder.

Also Read: 6 questions to ask during a startup job interview

Start with content marketing: Customer-driven content marketing can help your company address potential concerns and convert customers with more precision. Too often, companies blindly produce content, throw it out into the world, and hope it brings in leads. The content often centers on what the marketer thinks is important rather than what’s useful or relevant to customers. With few metrics to accurately measure content’s success, many marketers have difficulty gauging its effectiveness. Still, when done well, content marketing costs 62 per cent less than traditional marketing and generates three times as many leads.

Use marketing automation to help you scale: Marketing automation software helps companies market across multiple platforms. These services do everything from organise leads to create hubs that launch digital campaigns across many networks. This trend is still new though, and few companies have adopted it. But jumping on early will give your company a competitive edge in the next wave of marketing.

Use social media to extend the conversation: If content marketing starts the conversation and marketing automation scales it, then social media perpetuates it. Find out where your potential customers hang out, then speak their language. Don’t offer ebooks on Twitter, for example. Join the conversation on their terms.

Don’t forget the old ways: Personalisation doesn’t mean you should completely reject older methods. Instead, personalisation can transform those old techniques into efficient marketing tools.

Also Read: How to make high-quality SEO work for you

Direct mail is one example: Mailboxes were constantly stuffed with junk a few years ago, so no one noticed a good campaign. But many companies have stopped sending mail, and buyers are becoming much more receptive to good mail campaigns. This presents the perfect opportunity to create a targeted direct-mail message that potential customers will find refreshing.

Traditional marketing campaigns bring a single company message to a large pool of potential buyers, but that just isn’t cutting it anymore. Consumer trends are shifting toward personalisation and marketers need to take note. Buyers want results. When you tell a compelling story that directly relates to them, they’ll believe your company can deliver.

Content marketing, marketing automation, social media and even personalised traditional outlets can all reach potential customers effectively. But make sure your campaigns hone in on buyer personas and address their specific needs. Then you’ll have customers for life.

Justin Gray is the CEO and chief marketing evangelist of LeadMD. He founded the company in 2009 with the vision of transforming traditional grassroots marketing efforts through the use of cloud-based marketing solutions.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organisation comprising the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship programme that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

Echelon Asia Summit is now open for the Top 100 applications! Submit your startup now.

4 ways to take advantage of the new age of marketing

The Future of Marketing is Editorial Traffic – By Oliver Roup

The increasing uptake and adoption of cross-device web use is shaking up previously held assumptions about the most revenue-rewarding advertising streams available to merchants, publishers, and the affiliate landscape.

The most significant outcome has been the transposition of the banner ad from the standalone premier revenue position to a complementary method used alongside other innovative revenue strategies. Consider the growing number of mobile users who consume editorial content on small screens, which guides their purchasing behavior, and it becomes very clear that banner ads cannot remain the only advertising solution to speak to customers and drive revenue to publishers. There needs to be additional marketing strategies brought forward to effectively manage advertising efforts across multiple devices.

In the mobile heavy content consumption ecosystem, the advertiser’s landing page can actually serve as the ad, arrived at after being directed by links located within non-sponsored, unique, and informative online content. The “ad”, or lack thereof, should create a seamless channel from a publisher’s site to an advertiser via the publisher’s own content.

This positively reflects their brand and craftsmanship, rather than take away attention in an incommodious way. This marketing channel should equally reflect the advertiser’s brand and bring a seamless consumption experience to the audience.

It is not surprising to note that this style of content is increasingly created by enthusiast entrepreneurs on their editorial sites and mobile apps where their passion becomes the driving force of consumption. For example, PurseBlog, J23, and Audizine all epitomize this new phenomenon. The other positive outcomes of this approach range from the lack of additional overhead to content links being much more economical than search, display and native strategies.

The importance of this more mobile and cross-device world is repeatedly evident in mainstream news. Although mobile is yet to be most brands major revenue stream, they are seeing a sharp increase in both usage and influence.

Shockingly, even large traditional editorial houses have seen a turnaround in their dwindling readerships due to uptake of mobile and monetization strategies. The New York Times, for example, is growing due to programmatic and native marketing. Their EVP of advertising, Meredith Kopit Levien stated, “Only 10% of digital revenue comes from mobile. In the past year, though, mobile increased from one-third of user sessions to over half of user sessions”. Mark Thompson, Times CEO followed Levien’s claim stating, “Smartphone, tablet, and video, taken together, are now a significant reason why we turned what was a revenue stream that was in slight decline to a revenue stream that is growing healthily,” said Times CEO Mark Thompson.

Influential brands continue to tout their success with marketing strategies that rely on content created by online enthusiasts to drive consumers to their site or app. For them, marketing channels must be integrated across mobile devices where space is at a premium.

The future of marketing in our cross-device world relies on harnessing the power of enthusiast content, not simply relying on an ad unit.

Oliver Roup is Founder and CEO of VigLink
This article appeared in issue 29 of FeedFront Magazine, which was published in January 2015.http://issuu.com/affiliatesummit/docs/feedfront-29

Tagged as: affiliate marketing, Affiliate Summit, feedfront, oliver roup, viglink

The Future of Marketing is Editorial Traffic – By Oliver Roup

7 predictions for online marketing in 2015

More companies are expected to focus on mobile marketing in 2015.

Barely over a month into 2015 and it is already shaping to be an exciting year for online marketing. Some of the trends that dominated 2014 remain pervasive to this day, and there are a few surprising developments besides. Here are some of the more exciting new developments that we can expect to see in the coming months.

The continued growth of mobile optimization
More and more companies will focus their marketing efforts toward the mobile audience. More importantly, marketers will expand beyond the rudimentary app or responsive website, and actually develop content optimized for the mobile audience. Online marketers will also explore the social media marketing potential of the mobile community as well.

There are hints that suggest the continued growth of mobile-directed marketing in 2015. Google itself has frequently played up the importance of mobile usability with regard to search engine optimization. The company’s own Webmaster Tools suite now also includes a feature called Mobile Usability, further bolstering expectations of continued growth in the mobile marketing sphere.
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Social media marketing budgets takes a sharp upturn
As more companies get hip to the immense potential of social media marketing, budgets allotted into these online marketing platforms will increase dramatically. To be sure, there were signs hinting at this development as far back as the beginning of 2014. It was then that Facebook registered a 10% increase in ad revenue from the previous fiscal period.

The positive results that many businesses are now seeing will likely spur on increased focus on social media marketing. As more and more companies see their social media marketing investments begin to pay off, others will be keen to gain the benefits of increased traffic and wider spread exposure as well.

Content marketing takes on an increasingly larger role
One other aspect of online marketing that is expected to grow even bigger in 2015 is content marketing. As with social media marketing, the increased focus on content marketing will likely be driven by the success many companies have already realized with that particular strategy. Of the 93% of B2B marketers that employed content marketing in 2014, 42% reported favorable results as compared to 36% from the previous year.

Email marketing revisited
Over the past few years, email has largely fallen out of vogue as newer online marketing platforms became more prevalent. However, as social networks continue to restrict brand and business visibility and search engine algorithms become increasingly complex, the total control provided by a dedicated email list is becoming more appealing for a lot of businesses. More interestingly, email marketing efforts will become even more integrated with content marketing, resulting in a more effective online marketing thrust.

SEO, content marketing and social media become one
The trend toward integration is expected to encompass all forms of online marketing–search engine optimization, content marketing, and social media marketing included–blending them all into a single potent force. Content marketing itself is increasingly being referred to as the “new SEO”, a title that makes perfect sense when you consider the frequent integration of search engine optimization and content marketing.

That being said, it is important for online marketers to realize that content marketing will continue to play a significant role in influencing search engine visibility. SEO itself should be implemented in service of a solid content marketing strategy. Businesses would also benefit from bolstering their content promotion and distribution alongside the generation of quality content.

Humanizing becomes the primary thrust
Connecting with audiences on a deeper and more meaningful level has always been one of the driving aspects of online marketing. In 2015, more and more companies are expected to ‘humanize’ their marketing efforts even more, striving to develop audience rapport with the goal of increasing conversion, inspiring brand loyalty, and meeting cuts expectations.

Marketing shifts from promotional to relevant
Traditional ‘promotional’ marketing is old hat. What is needed now is a shift toward more relevant marketing that will actually deliver better and more easily calculable results than click-through and banner ads. As small- and medium-sized businesses realize the limited value of these traditional marketing vehicles, there will be increasing interest in online marketing channels that can provide a significant ROI. As things are shaping up in the online marketing world, all signs point toward the marketing potential of relevant and engaging content.

7 predictions for online marketing in 2015