Mediaboss Marketing

LinkedIn has shared a new overview of its various ad targeting options, along with some tips to help maximize your campaign performance, and reach the right consumers at just the right time via LinkedIn ads.

As explained by LinkedIn:

"Targeting is an essential element of any content marketing strategy and the right approach to targeting has never felt more important than it does right now. Growth over the next year will depend on inspiring those ready to do business and inspiring as many of them as possible."

With more businesses re-opening, and looking to return to growth in the wake of the pandemic, that could open up new opportunity, but in order to seize on such, you'll need to ensure the right people are aware of your products and services.

For the right offerings, LinkedIn could be a hugely valuable tool, and this overview could help provide a better understanding as to how you can use LinkedIn's ad platform to best effect.

And a key note: LinkedIn says that the ideal the audience size for your ad campaigns is between 60,000 and 400,000.

More info in the infographic below.

Read the original:
LinkedIn Provides an Overview of Effective Ad Targeting [Infographic] - Social Media Today

After testing it out over the last couple of months, Twitter is now rolling out its new tweet image display format, which will mean that full-sized previews of attached tweet images are now shown within user timelines, as opposed to the current cropping down to fit your picture into a specific tweet image frame.

You can see the current display on the left, versus the new format on the right. Rather than being cropped to within an inch of their life, making it difficult to see what the image actually is in many cases, Twitter will now show full-sized pictures in the timeline, which will change the way tweets are displayed -and will likely have a few implications from a digital marketing perspective.

The main change in approach relates to the larger tweet display for tweets with images, which equals more screen real estate, and more room to share your message. That could mean that attaching images will improve user response to your brand message, as it will be larger, and will stand out more in-stream - so you may want to experiment with images a little more in your Twitter process as a result of this update.

It also means that you no longer need to try and calculate exactly the right dimensions to ensure that users can see your attached image in the timeline.

Though there are some provisos to this - as explained by Twitter:

Within those parameters, you're good to go - so you will still need to ensure your Twitter images meet these requirements. But you won't have to upload different versions till you get just the right one that displays as you want in the feed.

And there is one other implication, as noted by Conviva's Nick Cicero:

This is an interesting, and valid consideration to keep in mind. If users no longer have to click on your tweets to expand your attached images, that will also likely result in a decline in engagement with your tweets. So if you regularly post images, and your numbers take a dip, this could be the reason why. Worth noting in your process.

It is also worth noting that this only applies to single-image tweets. Tweets with multiple images will still be displayed in the older format - so if you want to keep using the ol' 'open for a surprise' tweet engagement trick, you still can, just with multiple images instead.

It seems like a good addition, which will make your Twitter feed a more visually interesting space. Though it could take some getting used to - and again, for brands, it could mean that tweets with images generate a lot more user interest, due to the variable size and display.

Which could also, eventually, make this an annoying update. If brands work out that using the max image size is the best way to dominate space, that could render popular hashtags streams virtually unfollowable, as trendjacking reaches new (visual) heights - though Twitter is also working on curated topics to help improve this experience.

Still, it's an interesting update, which is sure to have implications to come.

Time to start experimenting with your tweets.

The new display update is now live in the latest version of the app.

More here:
Twitter Rolls Out Larger Image Display in Timelines to All Users on Android and iOS - Social Media Today

Carbar, by its own admission, is a brand with a complex proposition.

The car subscription company has successfully grown its audience and brand awareness almost exclusively through digital channels, with significant growth throughout 2020 and into 2021.

We have a complicated story to tell, and to tell it we needed to nail our proposition, build a category, establish a new audience and educate them on our service, Carbar chief marketing officer, Kieron Wogan, told CMO.

When I started with Carbar, the business was trying to do lots of things but wasn't really clear on what was working and why. We did our marketing research, identified audiences and rather than do lots of things mediocre, we agreed to focus on a few channels and do them well."

Backed by IAG, Carbar has developed a social-first approach, which has given the startup valuable tools in its marketing kit. We identified social as the key channel to grab attention, begin building the brand and warm leads. It would allow us to challenge category norms, do things differently while testing and refining our messaging to quickly learn whats working and whats not, Wogan said.

To do this well, we needed fit-for-channel creative and specialists that knew the platforms so we can bring the right media thinking with best practice creative. We partnered with Connecting Plots and grew our subscriber base by over 900 per cent that year." Wogan explained that, for Carbar, social allows it to reach its target audience efficiently. The organisation has added artificial intelligence (AI) improvements yet has found broad targeting is more efficient than narrow targeting. This means we can reach more people for less, he noted.

But its not all about reach. AI also allows us to focus on engagement and craft various sets of creative with multiple objectives to quickly learn what message resonates with each audience, adapt and iterate based on learnings.To effectively measure social strategies, the brand has been investing heavily in its data and tech capabilities. We review performance on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis focusing on interest, demand, costs to acquire and lifetime value, Wogan said.By focusing on a few channels, Carbar's marketing team can turn campaigns on and off or pulse spend to see the impact across leads and sales.

We use social to introduce and influence so we look at a variety of different metrics, some of the key ones being our reach efficiency through CPMs, cost of driving traffic to the website and cost of lead conversion, Wogan continued.

To hone its proposition, Carbar has done a lot of customer research from qualitative interviews to internal and external surveys about what appeals and what are the pain points for its customer base. Two key desires continue to surface in groups favouring car subscription: A desire for flexible living and for financial stability.

Through our surveying and social testing, weve found that messages leading with flexibility [no commitment], convenience [all-inclusive costs] and simplicity [simple weekly payment] resonate best with prospects, Wogan explained.

Carbar has three key pillars that form part of its creative brief each month.We try to survey our customer and lead base every quarter on various areas of the business. These insights are shared with our team and partners and included in briefs, Wogan explained.

We review the top performing creatives, build variations and add new messaging in the mix. Every month, every campaign we plan to beat our best with a new, improved set of creative. We often find creative fatigue or decay is slower than we think. For example, one of our creatives has been in our top performing campaign for almost a year.The next emphasis is test and learn across all channels and gleaning a variety of insights from all activity.

"Obviously, each channel has its role to play and some complement each other. We have and currently use creative learnings from social across other channels. Weve used it in search with some success and align messaging in our lead nurture and CRM programs, Wogan said.

Carbar is very clear about wanting to appeal to a certain segment of customers - those who want to simplify car ownership, have flexibility and certainty around costs.

We will continue to drive and amplify our digital and customer first strategies and apply the learnings we make along the journey to efficiently scale our business over the next few years, Wogan added.

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Why Carbar goes all in on social marketing - CMO

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Marketing teams are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to improve results, with marketers investing over $227 million in AI-based technologies in 2018 alone, according to Statista.

Yet many companies have yet to use AI or have just started exploring it recently. So what are the best entry-level AI projects in the CX/martech stack to establish success? Below are five recommendations.

With the rise of low-code technologies, were witnessing a Cambrian explosion of AI projects that are considered low-hanging fruit for marketers and customer experience professionals, said Jen Snell, vice president, product strategy and marketing, Intelligent Self-Service, Verint. Were now seeing immense success with automated interactions at the start of customer journeys, which is an area where most marketers are focused.

IVAs and chatbots were once major AI projects, but low-code solutions make it possible to quickly deploy and still return value to the business, Snell added.

Above all else, AI is about data, Snell said. Data is the frontier of modern marketing, yet most marketers dont have access to the type of data generated by interactions with an IVA. The depth of insights drawn from multi-dimensional interactions with IVAs is unprecedented and incredibly valuable to marketers. With this data marketers can continuously enhance and personalize experiences, identify gaps in the customer journey, and truly understand what drives their customers.

Related Article: The Future Is Multimodal: Why Voice Alone Will Never Be the Answer

AI offers a way to help serve the right type of experience to the right type of prospects, according to Adam Smartschan, chief strategy officer for Altitude Marketing. He offered three examples:

Implementing a quality management solution enhanced by AI allows companies to coach and train contact center agents more efficiently and without bias, according to Fabrice Martin, chief product officer for Clarabridge. Agents and managers can save time from training/coaching so they can focus on higher-value interactions, measure drivers of customer satisfaction and improve the customer experience across all channels.

Related Article: So You've Been Asked to Revolutionize CX as a Team of One

To successfully harness and leverage customer feedback, companies should implement solutions that incorporate natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language processing (NLP), Martin said. NLU uncovers the meaning behind text, such as tweets, emails, reviews, etc. On the other hand, NLP helps computers quickly read large amounts of text to uncover important business insights.

Both projects help businesses quickly gather insights into whats working and whats not. Incorporating AI drives efficiency, provides real-time insights and helps organizations better understand customers, which leads to an improved customer experience.

This is one of the most impressive and forward-thinking machine learning ventures I've seen. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are overflowing with big data, said Bram Jansen, chief editor of vpn Alert. Mining the data will help explain consumer feelings and viewpoints in a variety of ways. This project may also be used for digital marketing and branding to consider a customer's view or response to a product or service.

See the article here:
Getting Started With AI? Consider These Simple Marketing Projects - CMSWire

From connected TVs to independent streaming devices like Apple TV and Roku, consumers continue to increase their use of streaming for entertainment and news purposes. According to Conviva's Q1 2021 State of Streaming Report televisions continue to hold a 73% share of streaming devices; Roku captures about 30% of the share of streaming time from connected TVs.

"In every region in the world, streaming viewership is growing, representing a global shift in the way people consume content," said Bill Demas, CEO, Conviva. "This rapidly expanding international audience has created an enormous opportunity for content developers, device manufacturers and advertisers to engage new audiences as the brands and publishers who understand exactly how, when and where people are streaming, will inevitably triumph."

As to advertising, researchers found an overall 4% increase in ad attempts with ad quality metrics like start times and bitrates all showing marked improvement over the previous quarter.

One of the more interesting findings is this: people aren't direct navigating to the various streaming sites. Instead, many are finding new content via social media. Publishers have taken note and are now sharing more content via social networks; publisher posts within the social networks increased 99% YoY with engagement up 24%.

Conviva's State of Streaming report can be accessed here.

Tags: advertising, content marketing, content tips, content trends, Conviva State of Streaming, streaming ad trends, streaming ads, streaming content, streaming video trends, video content, video content trends

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Study finds streaming still on the uptick - Content Marketing - BizReport