Mediaboss Marketing

How do you ensure that potential customers come across your business at the right stage of the buying process? Digital Marketing trainer Ethan Giles of novi.digital explains.

Ethan will run the Digital Marketing Skills course on March 25th and 26th at Prolific Norths HQ on Princess Street, Manchester. We turned to him to provide a bit more detail on SEO and PPC strategy ahead of the session.

Each day there are 5.6 billion daily searches on Google alone, which provides a great opportunity to increase your website traffic, if you employ the right strategy.

But what is the right strategy? Consider that these potential customers will be in different stages of the buying process - some might just search for information or inspiration whilst others might have already made the purchasing decision and are now comparing their options.

There are two main ways you can take advantage of search engines - SEO or PPC. Both have their merits and both have their challenges, so make sure you understand them before you define your strategy.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) means you work on your website to ensure it is tailored towards users search queries. For example, if somebody searches for SEO training Manchester, Prolific North would want people to find their website as it is relevant for their training session. SEO is focused on the natural search results - those results on the search page that are not paid for.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is a form of advertising that search engines like Google offer in a number of different forms. With PPC, you tell the search engine what search terms or keywords you want your ads to appear for, and write relevant advertising. As the name suggests, you only pay when your ads are clicked, and you decide how much youre willing to pay.

Its free!Thats right, you dont have to pay to do SEO - apart from the cost of time of course.

Unlike PPC, you dont need to pay to appear in the natural or organic search listings, you just have to be well-optimised for user searches. Even tracking tools like Google Analytics or Google Search Console, which allow you to measure your SEO effectiveness, are free.

You can be creativeTheres an opportunity for you to be creative, as a big part of SEO is content and writing good quality content that users will care about.

This will help you stretch your businesss creative muscles. In addition, the usability of your site, including what it looks like and how it works, are important for SEO.

88%Organic results attract 88% of all clicks. So if you neglect your SEO and dont appear often or consistently, and rely on PPC instead, youre missing out on the vast majority of clicks and therefore a high proportion of potential customers.

CompetitiveIts not enough to simply have a website and expect this to be an effective SEO strategy. If you do your SEO properly, this will allow you to remain competitive and can often allow you to punch above your weight against larger competitors with bigger budgets.

SEO is about doing something really well, not about spending more money.

DirectUnlike SEO or other forms of advertising such as print, radio or TV, PPC allows you to directly target your customers by defining when your ads are shown and to who they are shown to.

There is no other form of marketing that is so effective at targeting relevant and engaged potential customers.

Cost effectiveYou manage your own costs and pay only per click. This means you can ensure that you only pay enough to ensure your ads generate an effective return on investment.

Unlike traditional forms of advertising, you have greater control of how much you spend, what you spend it on, and ultimately whether that spend generates results or not.

QuickPPC can generate instant results. If you were to set up a campaign now, you could expect to start seeing website visits within hours. This means that you can spend money and expect instant results without having to spend a long time working on campaigns.

SlowIt can take a long time before your SEO efforts start to generate results - changes you make today could take up to six months to start working. If youre looking to make a big difference in a short space of time, then SEO wont be an effective strategy for you.

ComplexSEO can often appear complex to newcomers - it combines multiple skillsets such as creative writing, web development, data analysis and even graphic design.

However, with expert training or expert support, SEO can often become easier as these complexities are explained or managed.

Lack of controlUnlike PPC, you do not directly control what search results you appear for. While you can optimise for particular terms, ultimately the search engine decides what is relevant and what is not.

You also cant control international targeting, so you may appear in search results in countries that are not relevant for your business.

CompetitionThe amount you have to pay to get clicks for ads will be defined by your competition and how much they are willing to pay. So if you are up against competition with bigger budgets or with a lack of understanding of their own profit margins, you may be quickly priced out of securing customers.

Too much controlSmall changes you make could make drastic differences to your bottom line. For example, you could increase your budgets tenfold in just a few clicks, or show your ad for irrelevant searches or in a location you cannot serve.

Google provides some security against this, but its recommended that you get proper training from experts before you pursue PPC.

Time investmentTo get PPC right, you need to invest time to manage your campaigns. Its not as simple as setting your campaigns up and leaving them to run without further changes.

PPC requires management and optimisation and things can change daily depending on your marketplace. This means that PPC can soak up time as well as the cost of the clicks. However, there are intelligent things you can do to avoid spending a long time within the PPC platform and its important that you prioritise on the things that will make the biggest difference.

Now that youre aware of both advantages and pitfalls of SEO and PPC, lets get back to the initial question, which one do I use?

The answer is, it depends. I wish there was a simple, universal answer but this is the beauty of it: it depends on your objectives.

What are the needs of your business? How much time can you invest? Whats your budget? And do you have the right skills in-house?

Depending on how you answer these questions, you might even look at a combined approach where you use both SEO and PPC together. In my experience, there are massive benefits to managing them holistically as it allows for the advantages of one to make up for the pitfalls of the other.

If you could use with more hands-on advice on search marketing tailored to your business, Ethan hosts regular workshops at Prolific North where we delve into just that. Browse the next available sessions here.

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SEO and PPC - making the correct choice - Prolific North

TLDR: The Essential Online Marketing Blueprint Bundle is just that a road map to using the webs most important platforms to help drive your marketing efforts, all for just $29.99.

Online users love visual contentbut do you know how much? And are you aware of the importance of landing in Position Zero in online search rankings? 2020 is here and theres a lot to learn, even for those who think theyre got the ins and outs of digital marketing on lock.

You can make sure youre up to speed on the constantly shifting digital landscape with the training in The Essential Online Marketing Blueprint Bundle, a nearly $300 value on sale now for just $29.99 from TNW Deals.

The collection brings together six courses that serve as a road map for hungry digital marketers looking to run better campaigns and make more money in 2020.

After the Content Marketing: The Strategy to Market in Minutes course sets the stage, youll start diving into more specialized areas for connecting and motivating potential customers into action.

From email campaigns (Email Etiquette for Digital Marketers) to SEO (The Ultimate SEO Blueprint: How to Easily Rank #1 on Google) to building your own affiliate marketing team (The Ultimate Affiliate Marketing Step-by-Step Blueprint), this step-by-step playbook detailing the precise messaging and procedures that work for each medium is an invaluable aid.

Whether youve got questions about how to leverage the power of LinkedIn to widen your sales circle (The #1 LinkedIn Marketing & Sales Lead Generation Blueprint) or exactly how to formulate and execute a killer Facebook ad initiative (Facebook Ads: The Ultimate Marketing Blueprint), your answers are here.

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Read next: AirPods can damage your hearing heres how Apple could prevent it

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Online marketing is always changing. Stay current with this $29.99 training collection. - The Next Web

Here, Ted Mann, CEO of Slyce, discusses the arrival of part recognition for visual search. Slyce specializes in visual product search. Previously, Ted founded the SnipSnap coupon app, InJersey hyperlocal network, and was a writer and editor at Gannett.

One of the most challenging experiences in retail is shopping for parts. Whether youre walking into a home improvement store looking for a 1.75-inch hex bolt, replacing a headlamp bulb in your car, or even finding the right missing Lego brick to complete a replica of the Millennium Falcon, its like searching for a needle in a haystack at most retailers.

The problem comes down to being able to identify the specific features and attributes of the part in question, and then being able to track it down amidst the thousands of part SKUs many retailers carry. This isnt just an issue for customers looking for replacement parts; its just as much of a headache for store associates. Helping customers find parts is such a pain point that many store employees will simply avoid the most SKU-dense aisles, like the Fastener aisle at many home improvement stores.

Outside of the customer interactions, the part-recognition quandary rears its head in other places: looking up parts without barcodes at point-of-sale is a regular, time-sucking task; decontaminating bays where the parts have been misplaced in the wrong bins and bays is a daily to-do; and enabling car mechanics to find the right replacement part when theyre working on an engine block is an especially tough obstacle.

Visual search, the technology that identifies products from photos, has long been thought to be an intriguing solution to the part-recognition challenge. Everyone from Amazon to Ferguson has invested in technology designed to enable customers and employees to find parts with their camera. Only, youve likely not seen one of these solutions in the market yet. For a short 1-month period, Amazon added a Part Finder mode to their visual search camera, but soon after removed it. While Amazon hasnt publicly commented on the reversal, testing of the feature was cumbersome and limited. Users needed to scan a part with a coin as a reference object for size, and even if you got over this hurdle, the feature only IDd a small number of screws and nuts.

Visual search for parts, it turns out, is more challenging than the technology is for, say, fashion or furniture. The reason comes down to training data. With fashion retail, visual search players ranging from Amazon to Pinterest to Slyce have been able to mine a rich trove of product photography to train deep-learning models to recognize both the features and tags associated with products, as well as overall image similarity. This enables camera search, as well as numerous other visual search applications like finding visually similar products when something is out of stock, or enriching product metadata to improve SEO and search. But the same visual-search experiences have been a challenge for part recognition mainly due to the dearth of imagery of the parts.

It would be tempting to jump to the solution of simply photographing all parts. However, early work in visual search for parts quickly revealed issues with this approach. For starters, smaller parts can have minute differences in size, or attributes like thread count and finish. Even if a retailer had a parts length and width in their metadata, these specifications might not match the end-to-end dimensions of the actual part but rather the size of smaller piece (think the shaft of a hex bolt). What was needed was a highly constrained environment, where the products could be photographed with ideal lighting to illuminate the product features and reduce any penumbral shadows, and where multiple measurements could be collected from a fixed camera.

Enter the Part Finder Kiosk, one of the first devices created to capture distributed training data of parts. The device, unveiled at the National Retail Federations 2020 Expo, enables a part retailer to quickly capture imagery of a part from multiple angles and orientations, and dynamically add it to a metric-learning visual search model to essentially teach the system to recognize new parts. The device is compact enough to enable the product photography to take place in warehouses and stores, so that parts dont need to be shipped to a remote studio.

Even more valuable than its ability to collect imagery and training data is the kiosks recognition mode. Customers and store associates can place any part that has been trained into the devices lightbox and get an instant, exact-match recognition of the part. Home Depot utilizes this kiosk, branded Drop & Find, in their stores to aid customers and store associates in identifying fasteners and finding the exact bay and bin they are located. With 90%-exact match on more than 5,000 fasteners sold in store, it is helping solve the age-old problem for customers, and giving the retailer extraordinary customer satisfaction scores.

NAPA Auto Parts is another retailer leveraging visual search for parts. Automotive parts come in a wide variety of sizes, though. So while the Part Finder Kiosk helps deliver NAPA know-how for many SKUs sold in store, NAPA is also leveraging visual search technology via mobile to help customers, store associates and auto technicians to quickly find and order replacement parts.

Similar to NAPA, Industrial companies ranging from Bosch to Daimler have begun utilizing mobile part recognition within their factories and warehouses. Typically the technology is integrated as a camera mode, where the end user snaps a photograph of a part to either find an exact match or a candidate part set. Similar to the kiosk solution, the most effective mobile solutions have required the collection of part training data to seed the models. Visual search software providers typically have an application that the retailer or industrial-part company can use to photograph the parts from a variety of angles. In addition to photographing the parts in isolation, it is common to also photograph the parts in situ (whether in the undercarriage of a car, in a manufacturing machine, or inside an oil rig) in order to create training data for a visual search index specific to that environment.

While it is still early days for part recognition, the technology is now delivering the same level of accuracy that visual search for fashion and furniture reached only two years ago. And just as visual search for fashion quickly became table stakes for most apparel retailers, it is sure to see similar rapid adoption among home improvement, auto, and industrial companies. Early adopters are initially embracing the mobile and in-aisle kiosk solutions. But soon, expect to see part recognition at point-of-sale and on assembly lines. Anywhere a customer or employee encounters the challenge of figuring what is this thing is fair game.

Read this article:
Visual Search for Part Recognition Arrives - Which PLM

In 2013, AHS Consulting founder Amna Shah started boosting her business'spresence on Facebook. She and her employees worked to build out a page with information about the Chattanooga, Tennessee-based company, and posted new content multiple times a week. Toattract potential customers, staffers crafted ads and paid to boost exposure of posts.

Shah knew consumer-facing brands may be better suited for Facebook's advertising and paid marketing, but assumed hers, too, could find an audience. Some existing customers interacted with the brand, and likes piled up. But Shah says no one new from Chattanooga or the nearbyAtlanta regionseemed to be finding her consulting firmthrough the platform--only some individuals from India and China.

"Over time, we started to think these were fake profiles," she says."We got no new business out of Facebook, ever." Halfway through 2018, the company stopped putting effort into Facebook marketing.

Shah is far from alone. In a November survey, Inc. asked CEOs and other high-rankingexecutivesfrom fast-growing companies what they think about Facebook from a business perspective. Thirty-two percent said they are now getting less for their marketing dollars with Facebook than they used to, while 27 percent said they mistrust Facebook's use of their business data. In follow-up interviews, several of the survey takers said theyhave slowed their use of Facebook marketing and advertising. Afew, meanwhile, have pulled the plug altogether.

For years Facebook has pouredenergy into targeting and educating small businesses, growinga team of publicists and outreach employees.As of 2018, more than 140 million businesses globally used Facebook, at least 90 million of which were smalland midsized businesses, according to the company. Veronica Twombly, the head of communications for Facebook Small Business, says SMBsare a "top priority" for the platform.

"We are trying to elevate our free and paid solutions to make sure these small- and medium-sized businesses know all of the tools at their disposal to help grow their customers," Twombly tells Inc. The company offers digital training for businesses, and held more than 100 in-person training sessions in the United States in 2019.

Facebook in the past has acknowledged the growing cost of its advertising for business, even as user growth has slowed. Finance chief David Wehner said in an investor conference call that in the fourth quarter of 2017 alone, the average price per ad climbed 43 percent, while the number of ad impressions served increased just 4 percent. Still, Twombly says the company is continuing to see growth in monthly active advertisers.

Several of the executives that told Inc. theyhave stopped advertising on Facebook over the past year were from business-to-business companies, which often can findcustomers more reliably on LinkedIn or through other marketing channels. Butothers outside of the B2B realmhave followed suit.One example is Jack Wight, the founder ofan electronics reseller thatadvertisedaggressively to individuals on Facebook in 2018but pulled the plug on the effort the following year.

"We weren't making any money on those people by the time we paid for the advertising," says Wight, the chief executive of Buyback Boss, which is based in Tempe, Arizona. "The marketing cost was just higher than other channels."

Wight estimates his company spent about $20,000 on Facebook ads over the course of a year,before giving up on Facebook about seven months ago. For 2020, his company is using a strategy of SEO and Adwords to find people who type in, for example, "sell my iPhone 10" on Google.

A Buyback Bossemployee who had been handling the company's Facebook presence and advertising now focuseson search marketing. Wight says he's open to resuming adspending onFacebook--but only after he's scaled the other marketing channels he's found more effective.

"We put some money into it, we risked some money to experiment," he says, "and it just didn't work."

Published on: Jan 10, 2020

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Facebook Used to Be an Essential Marketing Tool. These CEOs Are Doing Just Fine Without It - Inc.

30-second summary:

Most marketers already know they can capitalize on artificial intelligence (AI) to make more informed decisions, better engage their target audiences, and drive revenue for their organizations.

Yet, according to a Demandbase survey released in 2019, only 18% of B2B marketers and sales professionals are currently using the tech.

The same study also found that 67% of marketers expect higher lead quality from AI, and 56% believe the technology can help yield better engagement with customers and prospects.

So, whats holding marketers back from using it?

While marketers recognize the value that the tech can deliver, they often lack the perfect combination of prioritized sweet-spot use cases, people/organizational capacity, and technology to effectively execute an AI strategy.

Unfortunately, by not mastering this trio, marketers are putting themselvesand their companiesat risk of becoming obsolete.

Experts from McKinsey & Company predict that AI technologies could lead to a substantial performance gap between front-runners (who fully absorb artificial intelligence tools across their enterprises) and non-adopters or partial adopters by 2030.

AI front-runners are projected to potentially double cash flow by 2020, with implied net cash-flow growth of roughly 6% for through 2030, while non-adopters might experience around a 20% decline in cash flow from todays levels.

To avoid falling behind and to begin reaping the benefits, every marketer must prioritize identifying the best-fit use cases, hiring and/or developing the right people, and implementing the right technology in the year ahead.

The AI landscape is littered with failed projects, so heres what to keep in mind to increase your likelihood of success:

While there may be hundreds of AI use cases that a marketer will eventually want to execute on, marketers should first map out their top candidates according to two dimensions: value and feasibility.

Its okay to first think big, but then you need to narrow the list.

Among the common use cases are the following: intelligent chatbots, smarter personalized digital advertising, content generation and curation, AI-powered account or lead scoring, AI-assisted email responses, multi-channel marketing attribution, next best action, customer lifetime value, and sentiment analysis.

Marketers should estimate the value delivered for each use case (potential upside revenue, time-to-market, reduced manual labor, customer satisfaction), as well as time and effort it will take to see actionable results.

If the use case isnt both highly valuable and highly feasible and if you dont know how youll act on the predictive results then it should be taken off the short-term wish list.

Marketers who are unsure of where to start should consider assessing the value of these common high-impact applications:

Once marketing teams have identified the processes they want to apply AI to, they can start to identify the individuals who will lead the implementations and the technologies they need to bring those use cases to life.

The skillsets of the modern-day marketer are fast-evolving.

With the number of digital customer touchpoints that marketers need to managewhich includes everything from desktops and mobile devices, to social media and beyondmarketers need to consume, analyze, and leverage endless amounts of data to inform decisions.

That data is especially crucial for fueling valuable AI applications; without it, the systems wont have the necessary information they need to generate mission-critical insightssuch as predicting consumer behavior or creating truly personalized content.

Its no surprise then that Marketing Lands January 2019 Digital Agency Survey found 72% of agency marketers said data science and analysis will be the most in-demand technical skills in the coming years, followed by conversion rate optimization (59%), and computer science/AI and technical SEO (52% each).

Unfortunately, those skills are hard to come by; according to Indeed, the number of individuals searching for AI-related jobs decreased by 14.5% from May 2018 to May 2019. They also found that demand for data scientists increased by 344% from 2013 to 2019, yet the talent pool grew by just 14% in 2018.

Although the talent shortage certainly presents challenges for marketers, there are ways around it. Marketers can identify internal citizen data scientists.

These are individuals who possess deep domain knowledge and have a strong analytics background, but not formal data science training.

With the right tools and training, citizen data scientists can get up to speed on the organizations AI strategy quickly.

Additionally, marketers should consider hiring an AI consultant to support their initiatives or looking to their platform provider for guidance on AI strategies in the near-term while they work on adding AI to their marketing DNA and building it as a competency over the longer-term.

Regardless of the use case, there are different approaches marketers can take to leverage AI in marketing processes.

Marketers know well that there are some 7,000+ different vendor tools that could be leveraged in a martech stack, and an exponentially increasing number of those incorporate some AI, or at least claim to do so.

The most common approach taken by marketers today is to leverage AI that comes built-into a martech tool and that is optimized for just that one-point solution or capability.

That means marketers might have 10 different AI tools for ten different capabilities, but thats the most frequent approach today that gets fast time-to-market without having to hire or develop the AI competency in-house on day one.

While having those point solutions may work today for certain problems, the reality is that some of the highest value problems in marketing or customer loyalty cant be solved by a point tool.

Use cases such as next best offer, cross-sell/up-sell, churn prediction and reduction, customer experience optimization, price elasticity modeling, customer satisfaction, and others require a broader enterprise solution.

To that end, finding the right AI technology or platform backed by some business transformation help is absolutely critical to marketers AI success.

Here are three considerations for success when selecting AI technologies:

The impact of AI is being felt across all industries, and the savviest marketers are prioritizing getting their AI strategies in motion to maintain their organizations competitive advantage.

But in the AI-driven era, its not enough for marketers to be interested in AI; to be truly successful, theyll need to think critically about the processes, people, and technology that will be core to their AI missions.

Those that master that combination will be easy to identify, as their organizations will dominate for years to come.

Bill Hobbib is responsible for global marketing at DataRobot with over 25 years of experience marketing disruptive technologies to organizations of all sizes, including more than a decade in the data management, analytics, and SaaS space.

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AI in marketing: How to find the right use cases, people and technology - ClickZ