Here Are 10 Intriguing Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

The Women’s World Cup recently dominated digital and real-life discussions, as the U.S. women thrilled fans, winning the title Sunday and bringing home the World Cup trophy. So, our top 10 data points from the last week include a healthy dose of soccer-related stats. But, we are compelled to lead with a number that helps sum up the unusual story surrounding Reddit in the last few days.

1. More than 203,000 people have signed a Change.org petition to get Reddit CEO Ellen Pao to step down after controversy erupted last week about the firing of the website’s wildly popular director of talent, Victoria Taylor. The site has been in disarray for close to a week, with hundreds of subreddits being closed off from the public. Yesterday, Pao issued an apology, but it’s unclear whether her statements will make the problem go away.

2. According to Amobee Brand Intelligence’s comparative data, Nike’s sponsorship of the U.S. Women’s national team resulted in its being 121 percent more associated with the Women’s World Cup than tournament sponsor, Adidas, in content across 600,000 Web, mobile and social-media sites. 

3. With the scandals surrounding FIFA president Sepp Blatter, the soccer organization’s brand received a much-needed boost of positivity during the World Cup. There were 9 billion tweet-based impressions around the FIFA Women’s World Cup, according to Twitter. 

4. What’s more, FIFA’s YouTube channel absolutely smashed its all-time monthly views record during the women’s tournament in June, drawing 28 million views versus the 19 million it got in the same month a year ago—during the men’s FIFA World Cup. 

5. IBM got 1,000 sales and marketing staffers to promote its products and services on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook and has achieved huge results. In one example, the company told Adweek, it launched a business-to-business appeal called #NewWayToWork, which accrued 120 million digital impressions and drove 141,000 clicks to campaign content thanks largely to the employees sharing content through Dynamic Signal’s VoiceStorm software. 

6. A whopping 26 percent of millennials fake birthdays to get better deals online. Actually, that’s the kind of thing what makes the Internet awesome, right? Mindshare North America’s retail arm, Shop+, analyzed more than 1,000 responses to understand how 18- to 34-year-olds shop to suss out that data point.

7. Also, Shop+ learned Gen Y folks don’t stop there with their frugally-minded tactics. Thirty-six percent of them—compared with 24 percent of all adults—share an Amazon Prime account, which costs $99 a year, to receive free shipping.

8. YP has quietly become an effective player in the mobile-search market. For instance, Google controls 46 percent of mobile-search money, followed by Microsoft (Bing) with 11.3 percent. Twitter and Yahoo combine to own 17.8 percent of the market. All other search players combined make up the remaining 17.7 percent. What’s YP’s take? It gets 7.2 percent of the market, which is nothing to sneeze at if you are the old phone-book brand. (Read our feature on YP’s growing digital-ad business here.)

9. In the few days after the Supreme Court ruled that marriage equality was the law of the land, Facebook said 26 million people changed their profile picture and used the social platform’s rainbow filter to show their support for the LGBT community. 

10. According to a Yahoo study that surveyed 620 fathers, 50 percent of dads feel like ads rarely target them. These guys must not ever visit Zappos or other shoe retailers if that’s the case (#retargetinggonemad). 

Bonus stat: BuzzFeed created an entertaining video in which real Italian grandmothers try Olive Garden for the first time. The digital-media company published it on YouTube on July 3, and it’s gotten 1.2 million views so far and seems to be picking up speed. Somewhat surprisingly, a couple of the grandmothers go easy on the restaurant chain. Check it out below:

Here Are 10 Intriguing Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

Facebook marketing partner AreaOne opens office in Beijing

Xiaoyun Wu

AreaOne, a Facebook marketing partner, has opened an office in Beijing, which will form its Asia base.

The announcement:

TEL AVIV, Israel, July 6, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — Following years of serving the Asian markets’ biggest mobile companies, AreaOne  now becomes the first Facebook Marketing Partner to open offices in Beijing, China. “As one of the most important markets for AreaOne, opening a branch in China was a natural strategic next step for us,” explains Alon Michaeli , AreaOne CEO.

The company’s Beijing team will be led by Xiaoyun Wu , Head of Sales and Operations, APAC, who has been a central member of the AreaOne team for more than three years, and is behind the rapid growth the company has experienced in the region. “From Beijing we are now positioned to provide the most tailored marketing technology solutions and service for our Asian clients on Facebook® and across the mobile marketing ecosystem through the programmatic A1 Platform,” she stated.

In the region, AreaOne currently serves a diverse client base including Baidu, IGG, ChangYou, Boyaa Interactive and NetEase among many others. The new branch will be focused on assisting companies in China and Asia in identifying and acquiring their mobile user bases globally, across the world’s leading channels.

AreaOne, founded in 2011, is a performance marketing technology company dedicated to helping leading advertisers drive discovery, engagement, purchases and preference for apps, brands and products. AreaOne offers both fully-managed and self-service mobile marketing solutions to their clients through the proprietary technology of the A1 Platform, which includes state-of-the-art programmatic optimization algorithms that consider past, real-time and predicted future outcomes of mobile campaigns to automatically guide advertising to meet each client’s unique goals.

AreaOne’s new offices are located in Beijing’s tech-driven Wangjing district, and the company is now actively hiring for its growing local presence.

Source: press release

July 7th, 2015 at 8:00 am

Facebook marketing partner AreaOne opens office in Beijing

The B2B social media sales pitch: Giants tickets, anyone?

In Silicon Valley, Vantage Data Centers finds social media is a good way to find receptive sales prospects.

Vantage Data Centers sells a complex and expensive service, and it often takes the Silicon Valley company a year or more from the time it meets a client to the time it signs a contract. In the meantime, it woos prospects in familiar ways, such as inviting them to a baseball game or a concert. And it’s using social media to find out which kind of invitation will be most appealing to individual clients, says Steve Lim, vice president of marketing.

Vantage specializes in serving technology companies that rely on large and reliable data centers to run their operations and keep their customers happy without Internet downtime. Based in Silicon Valley, in Santa Clara, Calif., Vantage is riding the wave of surging volumes of Internet data generated by the Valley’s technology companies and their customers. “With the explosion of data, there’s so much information flooding around, and so many ways to connect to it and download it—but it has to sit somewhere,” Lim says.            

Vantage sells wholesale colocation services—in other words, it provides client companies with large, dedicated data center technology of 1 megawatt or more that they operate themselves. It generally sells to companies that have outgrown what’s known as retail colocation services, which typically offer smaller sections of data centers shared by multiple customers and managed by the data center provider.

Vantage’s service can cost its customers $100,000 or more per month over a 5- to 10-year contract. “Our deals are large, and we typically have a 12- to 18-month sales cycle,” or the time from initial contact with a prospective customer to a singed contract, Lim says.

As head of marketing, his challenge has been to get Vantage to stand out among the data center competition in Silicon Valley—a tough task but one with big rewards. The more contracts with the technology titans of Silicon Valley, Lim says, the better chance Vantage has of growing with those customers.

Wooing customers over a year or more can require long, consistent attempts to build relationships. “Our sales people build long-term relationships, often using traditional sales activity like invitations to special events, dinner and football games,” Lim says. The trick, he adds, is both finding the hottest prospects—and learning what they like. That’s where social media and other tools of the Internet come in.

To identify potential prospects, Lim and his team use techniques ranging from browsing online prospect-finding services like Data.com, DiscoverOrg.com and RainKingOnline.com to using street smarts like simply noticing when a company down the street starts to show signs of expanding.

One old-school attempt to woo an identified list of prospects was to simply reach out en masse to Silicon Valley executives with what might be considered popular invitations—tickets to a San Francisco Giants or Golden State Warriors game, for example. The trouble is, not everyone’s big on baseball or basketball. Some prefer auto racing, others opera performances. “It was like putting our finger in the wind and doing some cold-calling,” Lim says. “It wasn’t targeted. If we look at 80,000 contacts, how many are really interested in the Giants or Warriors?”

One step Vantage has taken to better target how it reaches out to prospects is using social media data from People Pattern, a company that aggregates and analyzes information from various online social networks to help build targeted marketing campaigns.

By using publicly available information connected with the names, job titles and companies of prospects on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, People Pattern pieces together information common to groups of prospects—for example, senior-level executives within a particular industry that have commented on data center technology with professional colleagues and on the San Francisco Giants with friends. In addition, Vantage may also match those prospect lists with the names of people that have also downloaded one of its white papers on collocation services, providing a list of contacts that appear ripe for an invitation to discuss Vantage’s services while taking in a ballgame.

Lim notes that People Pattern is only one of several strategies Vantage is using to attract the right customers. It’s also working to improve its search marketing techniques, testing new online display ads and redesigning its web site at VantageDataCenters.com, where customers can log on to manage their accounts.

But he adds that People Pattern has stood out in its ability to target segmented groups of prospects, including groups centered around Silicon Valley. “Everyone talks about how they bring in social data, but I haven’t seen anything other than People Pattern to aggregate and analyze that data and produce targeted information,” he says.

While initially using People Pattern during the first half of this year, Vantage applied its information in social media marketing campaigns—including promoted tweets on Twitter and sponsored updates on LinkedIn—and produced a 44% increase in its clickthrough rate, the company says. In addition, it notes that 25% of Internet traffic on marketing landing pages came from social marketing campaigns targeted with People Pattern data.

People Pattern’s annual fees start out at less than $10,000 but can run more than $100,000 depending on the amount of data used, People Pattern says.

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The B2B social media sales pitch: Giants tickets, anyone?