Mediaboss Marketing

Cell service providers collect location data on all of their customers, all of the time. This means that anywhere you go with an operating cellphone, your provider is monitoring and recording your every step based on GPS coordinates. These data are sold to marketers, who use it for a wide variety of uses.

Here's an example: Your local Chevy dealer buys the cellphone ID information of everyone who walks into the Ford dealership across the street. As soon as someone test-drives a new Ford, the Chevy dealer taps into a massive database to match their phone information to their name, home address and email, not to mention a host of other profile information about each person.

Now that Chevy knows all of Ford's potential customers, it can market its own cars in very competitive ways. The company not only knows who's in the market for a new car, it can also target sale prices, incentives and the benefits of a Chevy in ways that compete directly with Ford. This can include email blasts, postcards and digital marketing ads through a network of third-party websites that those specific users frequent.

"Location marketing is taking over the digital landscape," said Mike Ruffing, a digital marketing expert with Midwest Direct in Cleveland. "Buying ads to increase awareness is one thing, but placing incentives in front of qualified, active buyers takes this technology to a completely different level."

While location-marketing technology has been around for several years, until very recently it was cost-prohibitive for small and midsize companies to take advantage of it.

Today, for small businesses, location-data marketing has become far more approachable, accessible and cost- effective. It can be a very useful tool when trying to match elusive audiences with very specific offerings.

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Adviser: Digital marketing at the speed of change - Crain's Cleveland Business

Issuu, the worlds largest digital discovery and publishing platform, today announced it has made two major marketing hires:Kevin Walkeras Senior Vice President of Marketing andMichelle Zuccaas Global Head of Digital Marketing. They will be responsible for leading content marketing programs, brand management and demand generation to support the companys strategic growth plan martech news.

As a profitable and growing company, Issuu is continuing to expand our offerings in order to best serve our current customers, as well as further extend our base to the hundreds of millions of SMBs worldwide. With this new marketing push, our goal is to become the core platform that enables these businesses to tell their stories, share content and connect with their audiences, everywhere, saidJoe Hyrkin, CEO, Issuu. Both Kevin and Michelle have a huge focus on customer experience and bring a wealth of knowledge in growing SaaS businesses that will be instrumental for our next stage of growth and beyond martech.

Prior to Issuu, Walker served as Vice President, Marketing at InVision, a digital customer experience product design platform. Previously, he spent five years at Indeed, where he led country strategy and field marketing during its$300 millionto$3 billionrevenue growth phase. He also held a number of senior level marketing roles at Dell.

I was drawn to Issuu due to the companys attention to solving the biggest pain points of todays creators who are looking to share content on a greater scale, engage further with their audiences or even build a sustainable business, said Walker. Issuu has been at the forefront of innovation, developing solutions that help them achieve goals, and with exciting new features in the pipeline, Im looking forward to working with Michelle and Issuus impressive team to continue building on Issuus successes.

Zucca came to Issuu from Skillz, a leading mobile eSports platform, where as the Head of Marketing she helped double revenue from$400 millionto$800 millionin six months. Before Skillz, she was the Senior Director of Campaigns and Digital Marketing at Singularity University, a global learning and innovation community using technologies to tackle the worlds biggest challenges social media advertising.

Over the last year, Issuu has focused on streamlining the Story creation and distribution process and has rolled out a number of solutions within the Issuu Story Cloud, including top-tier integrations with InDesign, Dropbox, Google AMP and Google Drive. It also recently launched Issuu Promote, a Story Ad tool that, when combined with Adobe InDesign, allows users to create and serve Facebook and Instagram Story-formatted ads directly from InDesign. Still currently in beta, Issuu Promote has received positive feedback from test users.

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Issuu Bolsters Marketing Team with Executive Hires to Drive Growth - Martechcube

March 2020: SOCIAL has always believed in paving new paths with the spaces it creates. This International Womens Day, the brand is kickstarting some trailblazing activities both inside and outside SOCIAL to empower and enable its community of women.

Led by culture and inspired by our community, S(#stree)CIAL is not a one-off token day of celebration. Rather, it is an always-on conversation that is deeply embedded in the DNA of the brand. Divya Aggarwal, Head Marketing, Impresario Handmade Restaurants, says, SOCIAL is known for creating spaces that epitomize its core values of community and creativity. This International Womens Day, we are doing just that by initiating conversations around the pillars of Safety, Inclusivity, and Opportunity. These pillars are the driving forces behind our pledge to move forward with the community and leaving no one behind.

On the back of substantial experience in curating forward-thinking events across the country, the all-day caf and high energy bar is hosting three exciting #charcha panel discussions around the topics of Safety, Inclusivity, and Opportunity at select outposts in Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore on March 8, 2020. Adding to the conversation will be talk-worthy Live Art demos with three female artists. Whats more, SOCIAL is also collaborating with like-minded brands like MTV, LXME (Indias first financial planning platform for women), and Ladies, Wine and Design, to give its community a free and safe space to convene, collaborate, and communicate.

Special events include a fun session called Girls Just Want To Have Funds in collaboration with LXME, at antiSOCIAL Mumbai. FC Road SOCIAL in Pune will see Art Baithak in association with Palat Studios and Ladies, Wine and Design, where you can come by and discuss art with like minds and even buy handpicked art pieces created by women.

Says Riyaaz Amlani, MD & CEO, Impresario Handmade Restaurants, We have also internalised the core pillars of Safety, Inclusivity, and Opportunity at a company-wide level. Since January 2020, we have been working actively to make our spaces safer, more inclusive, and employment friendly for women. I hope this gives impetus to other brands in the Indian F&B industry to follow suit.

To make its customers day and nights safer at SOCIAL, the company has proactively employed women bouncers aka Safety Warriors who are always on hand to help, should you need it. SOCIAL also has a zero-tolerance policy towards incidents that make women uncomfortable in its spaces. Having shots at 12 AM? Going for a late-night gig? Theyll be there. If you need a cab back home after a late night of partying, the staff will help you book one and also make call backs to check if youve reached home safely. The goal is to ensure that your SOCIAL outing is fun, and more importantly, safe.

The company has also signed a year-long partnership with the not-for-profit organisation One Future Collective, to create company-wide policy changes and new trainings on sexual harassment in the workplace, gender sensitisation, as well as gender diversity and inclusion with empathy and heart at its core. Impresario is committed to the cause of inclusivity and diversity by also recently hiring a Diversity Officer to lead the initiative.

At your nearest Impresario restaurant, you will now find a lot more women working across all levels, with a new internal policy that mandates that a minimum of 20% of the workforce is to comprise women. By proactively employing more female staff across its culinary, managerial and guest relations teams, the company will provide more opportunities for employment and engagement.

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SOCIAL unveils the S(#stree)CIAL campaign for International Women's Day - Indiantelevision.com

International Women's Day is a chance for brands to show what they're doing to promote equality and arguably raise their profiles and sell more too.

CNBC takes a look at what some businesses are doing to mark the occasion Sunday, from Betty Crocker's response to an eight year-old boy who realized its cake instructions were aimed at women, to Absolut's campaign around sexual consent.

"We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much," goes the soundtrack to Apple's "Behind the Mac" ad on YouTube, released Tuesday.

It's a compilation of pictures of women, including campaigner Malala Yousafzai, soccer star Megan Rapinoe and #MeToo movement founder Tarana Burke. They're shown working on Macs, and the song uses words from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TEDx talk, "We Should All Be Feminists," which was sampled by Beyonce in her song "Flawless." The company is also running events in-store highlighting women creatives.

An image from Apple's "She Creates" initiative for International Women's Day 2020

Apple

Despite some moves forward for women in the Middle East, packs of Betty Crocker cake mix still used stereotypes, addressing only women in their instructions. That changed when eight-year-old Sultan, living in Ras al Khaimah, tweeted Betty Crocker to ask: "Why do your baking instructions only speak to women?" The General Mills-owned brand updated the Arabic instructions on more than 100 products to gender-neutral nouns and verbs and launched its "The Kitchen is for Everyone" ad campaign, by agency VMLY&R, on Tuesday, which will run on social media in the region.

Baking company Betty Crocker changed its Arabic pack instructions to be gender-neutral, rather than female, after a boy in the UAE tweeted the brand.

Betty Crocker | VMLY&R

Words create stereotypes, and adjectives like "cold," "pushy," and "aggressive," are labels that are often used to describe women in the workplace, whereas "assertive" might be used instead of "aggressive" for a man exhibiting similar behavior, according to non-profit Catalyst. It is seeking to tackle unconscious bias with a software plug-in for Slack that suggests alternative adjectives, and is also encouraging men and women to tweet pictures of themselves with words that have been used to describe them.

The non-profit Catalyst is running a campaign highlighting unconscious bias for International Women's Day 2020

Catalyst

The Swedish alcohol brand launched a campaign called "Drink Responsibly.#SexResponsibly," on Valentine's Day with ads stating: "Buying someone a drink doesn't buy you a yes," and it aims to continue the conversation ahead of International Women's Day. It is working with influencers to share stories on social media tagged#StillNotAYes and is running an event on March 12 where actress and producer Olivia Wilde and others will discuss consent. It has launched the campaign with RAINN, theRape, Abuse & Incest National Network.

Ahead of Valentine's Day 2020, Absolut vodka launched a series of ads highlighting sexual consent.

Absolut

When tour company Intrepid Travel realized that most of its trip leaders were men, it sought to equalize the imbalance, noting that 65% of its customers are female. Zina Bencheikh, general manager of Intrepid Travel's Morocco office, successfully lobbied for the country to license more female tour guides and this week the business launched women-only tours to Pakistan, Israel and the Palestinian Territories. It plans to report on its progress towards equality by 2022.

Intrepid Travel has launched women-only trips to Pakistan.

Intrepid Travel

Time magazine was "created by men for 'busy men,'" and it named its annual "Man of the Year" in 1927, only changing it to "Person of the Year," in 1999, according to its executive editor, Kelly Conniff. Now, Procter & Gamble is backing Time's release of 100 influential "Women of the Year" profiles, including the likes of campaigner Greta Thunberg, author Toni Morrison and chemist Rosalind Franklin, and has sponsored a documentary on how the women were selected. P&G brands that will advertise in the printed issue include Pampers, Olay and SKII.

Time Magazine has published covers of 100 "Women of the Year" for International Women's Day 2020. Scientist Tu Youyou was the first woman in China to win a Nobel Prize.

Time

Kind held around 10% of the U.S. market share for snack bars in 2019, according to Euromonitor, and this year it has decided to get political for International Women's Day. It is running a petition to campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to go ahead a change to the constitution that was proposed in 1972 and is now back before Congress. It will also donate profits from its limited-edition "Equality" bar to the Alice Paul Institute, which is campaigning for the ERA to be ratified. Bars can be bought via its website, where it sells multi-boxes and subscriptions.

Kind's "Equality" bar

Kind Healthy Snacks

"It's a Man's World" might seem like a counter-intuitive name for a women's product range, but Reebok did just that when it launched a collection designed by women, with the phrase crossed out on its footwear. Reebok, owned by Adidas, just dropped its 2020 "It's a Man's World" collection ahead of International Women's Day.

An image from a Reebok x Array event celebrating women in film at Array Creative Campus on February 08, 2020 in Los Angeles, California.

Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for Reebok

Anti-poverty non-profit Care has created a public service announcement-style ad featuring "Scandal" creator Shonda Rhimes. Rhimes and its stars, Kerry Washington, Bellamy Young and Katie Lowes, describe the ways in which women are marginalized. The aim is to have people sign a petition to support the Safe From The Start Act, legislation that would require U.S. humanitarian programs overseas to prioritize the needs of women and girls.

"Scandal" creator Shonda Rhimes and star Kerry Washington pose as part of a campaign by non-profit Care for International Women's Day.

Care

He's not exactly a brand, but India's Prime Minister tweeted that he will "give away" his social media accounts to women who are inspiring and is asking people to enter a competition to run his Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts on Sunday.

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Apple, Absolut Vodka and Reebok: What brands are doing for International Women's Day - CNBC

The traditional marketing and sales funnel has long been accepted as the optimal method for inbound customer acquisition. Brands look to leverage many tactics to fill the top of their funnel with as many leads as possible and let the sales team filter them out and close the deal. It seems simple enough, right?

But in todays saturated and complex market, this cookie-cutter approach is not enough to ensure an ideal prospect journey. Simply throwing money at pay per click (PPC), direct mailers or social media ads puts an emphasis on filling the funnel but can leave your sales team out to dry. Many leads will not be nearly ready to engage with your brand or may not be the right fit for your product or service. If you are a new brand, operate in a niche category or are disrupting an industry, this sentiment will be multiplied.

An emphasis needs to be placed on building your brand so that when prospects come in contact with a piece of content, a media placement or a social media post, they are already familiar with who you are and what you do. This is building a funnel above the funnel to develop targeted awareness and appear in the right spot, at the right time, for the right people.

A key driver of this funnel above the funnel idea is brand vision essentially, the core concepts that inspire your company. This supports your overall business strategy, differentiates your brand in the marketplace, draws in leads and excites your employees. Your brand vision may begin with a list of keywords, a mantra or an image, but soon, this vision should expand to every touchpoint of the company. From your logo and branding to marketing copy and even the verbiage your sales reps use, a brand vision is the starting point for any successful marketing journey.

However, a brand vision is not exclusive to new brands. In our practice, we see many established companies in need of a refresh. Their sales have gone stagnant and they are watching competitors pop out of every corner. As industries change, technology advances and customer needs shift, your brand needs to as well. Not just your operations or offerings, but how you are positioned in the marketplace. Ad dollars are going to waste if your brands message is being misconstrued. Your target audience is likely different than it was even five years ago; the same goes for their pain points and needs. A similar effort that goes into evolving your product or service needs to be replicated into developing your brand. Prospects wont care if you have a superior offering if the look and feel of your brand appear antiquated.

An ideal way to ensure that your brand is aligned with your target audience is simply to ask them. Based on many of our brand vision projects, I'd suggest leveraging market research and focus groups to build detailed customer personas and bounce ideas and strategies directly off of the people who would be interested in your services. This feedback can inform your imagery, tone and marketing tactics to drive meaningful connections with your audience. Listening to your prospects offers your brand a 360-degree view of what your stakeholders care about.

A great example of this concept in action is our own recent brand vision project. As an integrated agency that builds innovative and disruptive brands, we needed our imagery and messaging to reflect this approach. We revamped our logo and website to a sleek, minimalistic view, narrowed our positioning to focus solely on technology companies, and began generating content that echoed these sentiments. We created customer personas to mirror the key tech decision-makers we were looking to work with. This informed everything from the topics of our blogs to our verbiage in social media posts to the types of publications we targeted for thought leadership. All content was crafted keeping in mind the top pain points of growing technology companies. The results were stunning, and we quickly generated record levels of targeted inbound leads. By simply tweaking our brand vision, we were able to carve out a larger part of the market and convert on many of the prospects that came knocking at our door.

The brand vision is how you connect all facets of your business to the key stakeholders who may engage with your brand. The same emotions should be invoked when a prospect looks at your logo, scrolls through your website, reads an ad or stumbles upon a piece of content. This connected approach will grow on your prospects and draw them into your sales funnel when they are ready. Instead of throwing money at PPC and seeing what sticks, brands need to take a holistic approach to marketing. Tactics may work here and there, but they will limit lasting impacts. Investing in your brand and building the funnel above the funnel is the key to unlocking scale and staying power in an ever-shifting business environment.

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The Funnel Above The Funnel: The Importance Of A Distinctive Brand Vision - Forbes