Will GDPR be the change of digital marketing as we know it?

The new General Data Protection Regulation, henceforth referred to as GDPR, is established for preventing companies from using personal data. GDPR will be valid in the European Union in May 2018 and will create changes in the digital landscape that will both help and harm publishers according to Ross Benes (2017). These potential advantages and disadvantages that GDPR brings for publishers have Benes listed in his article “The GDPR will help or hurt publishers, depending on who you ask”, these will shortly be presented below.

Source: https://static.pexels.com/photos/113885/pexels-photo-113885.jpe

“Publishers that users regularly visit could benefit from the regulation”, said Yves Schwarzbart, head of policy and regulatory affairs at Interactive Advertising Bureau U.K. The reason for this is that users will spend more time on less sites, because the visitors do not want to deal with all new annoying prompts, he says. Therefore users will only accept prompts on web pages that they like the most or visit most often. While the access of personal data will be reduced by GDPR, the advertisers have to change strategy. A new strategy could instead be to buy more ads on the well-known brands sites, which will increase the income for premium publishers. But on the other hand, while a few publishers will have benefits from GDPR many other publishers will struggle to keep their position because of the new strict privacy controls. The regulation can also give Facebook and Google more benefits and increased control in the digital landscape. In first hand Google make their money from searching by keywords and not by using personal data. And Facebook has a login account, which means that their users accept Facebook's terms and conditions on the web page, which means that it is not so difficult to get the users permission to use their personal data. For the publishers it is a lot more difficult.  It is still not clear how the new regulation will be enforced, but if the users need to accept every publisher and web page the companies will probably not have enough of data to continue with the measurement that is used today. This will lead to a new marketing approach (Benes, 2017).

We believe that this new regulation will impact the way companies deals with marketing today, and also that the regulation in short term will hit some companies harder than others. The main point though is not the regulation, but the increased knowledge of the users and their need of privacy. Internet is the new “living room” in the society today and in that living room people expect to have privacy, at least to a certain extent. The need of privacy is universal, and therefore people will fight for it. The knowledge and the debate about the privacy situation (or the non privacy situation) online increase and this will force companies to think more ethical and change their way of how they use personal information. Otherwise people will boycott those web pages and publishers that do not change their way of acting. For this reason, companies will need to change their marketing approach, and not solely because of GDPR. The focus on how the new regulation harms and helps publishers is therefore not essential in this case. What companies need to focus on are how they can help users to keep their privacy online, otherwise they will lose their reputation and position. This is also for Google and Facebook a necessary issue, to connect to Bennes (2017), they are not safe.

Emilia Djerv & Louise Wendel

Reference:

https://digiday.com/media/gdpr-will-help-hurt-publishers-depending-ask/

Influencer marketing – a concept that is here to stay?

As you’ve probably heard before, the best marketing out there is the one which travels from mouth to mouth. In fact, statistics from Nielsen show that 83% of us trust recommendations from people we know. In the digital world of today, where communication reaches far further than the closest circle of family and friends, it is not difficult to understand the strategic use of influential people online. In fact, it’s been shown that 60% of people across all age groups would buy a brand recommended by a Youtuber (Acumen, n.d).

Shane Barker (2016) wrote an interesting blog post on this matter where he shared some of his own tips and ideas on how to use influencers as a tool for attaching favorable associations to a brand. Accordingly, people form emotional connections with the personalities they choose to follow. They identify with them and trust them. So, what could be more effective than letting your target group get in touch with your brand for the very first time on the market place of an influencer? Below follows Barker’s list of tips.

1. Forget Big Influencers

Prioritize relevance over mass reach. Collaborating with mid-level influencers rather than the largest ones could mean higher engagement with the audience. Look for those who are best to connect with their audience on an emotional level!

2. Reward Brand Advocates

Do not limit yourself to well-known individuals. Those who already are customers and appreciate your products could be your best advocates. Include them in your influencer marketing by rewarding them. Why not provide them with exclusive offers or feature them on your social media?

3. Let Them Do the Talking

Do not dictate the way an influencer promotes your brand. No one knows their audience better than themselves – so do not interfere with their content creating.

4. Social Media Takeover

Let your influencers take over your social media accounts for a while. This way, you can let your brand story meet a story from a customer’s perspective.

5. Be a Storyteller

Utilize the voice of your influencers and let them share a story about your brand. What impact does your brand have on them?

6. Host Contests and Giveaways

Instead of going through your own channels – host your contests and giveaways through your influencers. Then, give products to the winner along with a feature in both your brand’s and the influencer’s social media channels.

Source: https://www.twenty20.com/photos/e56068e4-7c9f-4732-8ff9-2e52ddc8a852

Nevertheless, despite the straightforwardness and the applicability of these tips, we argue that there could be reasons to be critical when looking at what value influencers can add to digital marketing strategies in the future. Like Barker, we believe that the most important part is to make sure that the influencer is able to express the brand personality naturally through their content. However, as audiences get increasingly informed and their relationships to the content makers get seemingly tighter, they might become increasingly suspicious and quicker to recognize unauthentic messages. The consequence of that could be that the profiles who publish many paid collaborations with brands would lose some of their social following, as audiences would move towards other, more genuine content creators.

So what do we do with this? Should we stop believing in influencers as marketing channels in the future? Certainly not. On the contrary we argue that the power of influencers, if managed properly, could become even larger. However, for audiences not to lose interest as soon as they identify marketing content, there has to be some type of deeper exchange for the reader as well. If they value what they see, it will not matter whether the profile received money to share it or not. And if that is settled – focus will instead be on the comprehensive travel destination guide, the interesting demonstration of a new technical gear, or the extensive post on how to succeed in your professional life.

So, let us say goodbye to shallow paid posts which can be displayed just as well through the brand’s own channels, and make room for innovative and interesting collaborations. If not for the sake of own social feed, let us do it for the survival of the influencers.

Louise Wendel & Emilia Djerv

References:

http://www.nielsen.com/content/dam/nielsenglobal/apac/docs/reports/2015/nielsen-global-trust-in-advertising-report-september-2015.pdf

http://sandbox.break.com/acumen/Acumen%20Constant%20Content__ExecSum%20Booklet_Final2.pdf

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/form-emotional-connections-influencer-marketing/165252/

Machine learning and Digital marketing- Study of a Recent Trend

Machine learning is responsible for a slew of radical new advancements across many industries. Usage of machine learning is a very recent and hot topic in the digital marketing area. Advancements in machine learning, predictive analytics, big data and artificial intelligence aren’t limited to not only big giants but also now organizations of all sizes are capitalizing on the power, using this revolution.

ML is a part of Artificial Intelligence —it’s just something that has evolved over time, and gained considerable new strengths in recent years. Recent examples include online product recommendations, which use big data to make algorithmic suggestions to consumers. Google’s search browser also examples of ML: not only do search results themselves flex the power of machine-centric problem-solving to understand intent and speak to the searcher’s pain points, but Google routinely uses ML technology to make sense of search queries, such as when those queries are littered with spelling errors.

different brands are already started to use  ML to drive insights and operations that go well beyond text. For example, companies use ML to make brand email marketing more efficient and productive. Machine learning analyses consumer behaviors to determine when email delivery is most likely to draw engagement and conversions. By timing emails according to those insights, clients have seen double-digit increases in email-generated revenue (Source: Harvard Business Review).

As behavioral and contextual data becomes more available to brands, using ML technology these are trying to many hidden information from data.  If marketers are unable to put that data into context and drive insights from the information. ML picks up where those marketers and their analytics tools fall short, processing data at an enormous volume to leverage that information for valuable insights.

One of the most interesting examples of this, very recently Target’s marketing team able to learn of a teenager’s pregnancy before the girl’s parents. That realization came by examining her shopping history and giving it context based on past purchases from other consumers. Based on her shopping behavior, Target reached the conclusion she was likely pregnant, and the company shifted its marketing to specifically address her new pregnancy needs.

ML is already being utilized in marketing campaigns around the world, but the full force of its influence is yet to arrive. A recent prediction by market research experts, ML will soon move from its service at the individual consumer level to a larger role that considers large groups at once, and external factors as well as internal data.

Machine learning may sound futuristic to many people at this moment, but my belief, its usage in long run increase intelligent marketing and efficient customer interactions that benefit both customers and businesses. Marketing teams can adapt and evolve through exposure to new data quickly, and can accelerate business processes for the long run in future.

LEARN MORE ABOUT ONLINE SHOPPING CARNIVAL

LEARN MORE ABOUT ONLINE SHOPPING CARNIVAL

As the China’s Single Day and Black Friday are coming within two months, let’s talk something about them.

Background

Black Friday：Black Friday is the day following the Thanksgiving Day. Originally, the phrase Black Friday means the heavy traffic jam after Thanksgiving. Since 1952, it has been regarded as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season in the US. Major retail store would open very early and provide lots of promotion choice. And it has become the busiest shopping day since 2005.

Double 11：The write of November 11^th is written as 11—11. And these four barely sticks emphasis the meaning of “bachelor” in this special date, so it also called the Single day. Why the bachelor has their own festivals in China? Single days began as an anti-Valentine’s Days since 1990s from Nanjing University. It’s known that because of the imbalance of the gender in China. The one-child policy has been ended these days. But it affect deeply on Chinese gender situation. There were lots of families would choose to abortion when they get pregnant with a girl in the few years before. Because the culture let them think a son would led to a male surplus. In 2011, official Chinese data show that there were 20m more men than women under the age of 30. And with the gap would become bigger in the following years.  

In 2009, the chief of Alibaba spotted a commercial opportunity on this day and began launching “double 11” online shopping.

The strategy of Double 11 and Black Friday

1.     Cost leadership. This means the companies offer more affordable products because the costumers want to have an opportunity to buy lots of things and cost less money than the product’s original price. Except discount strategy, the “zero” marginal cost is also the part of cost leadership strategy. The traditional physical stores have limited ability to handle with massive costumers compare with online digital shops. One of significant characteristic of digital word is much less margin cost. In the early years of Black Friday, the promotion is only limited within the traditional stores. Now, it could become a worldwide shopping carnival. But the only thing companies want to sell the products worldwide might be just create an English version shopping pages. For Double 11, it was started from a Alibaba, the biggest online shopping centre, so they don’t need to worry about the much marginal cost as much as physical stores.

2.     Make the shopping period unique. The Black Friday and Double 11 are both seasonal event. If the Black Friday and Double 11 happened every month or every week, people won’t value the event.

3.     Advertising. Since 2010, Double 11’s advertising has become more attractive. They started to advertise since almost two weeks ago. Most shops on Tmall started to post their promotion on their social net work page, or post their well-designed poster on the eye-catching position on other websites. The same as Black Friday, the shops started to send email about promotion to users weeks ago, and put their ads according to cookie on Google and any other worldwide website. So the “preheat” of the shopping carnival is also very important. Advertising could mobilize the enthusiasm of customers.

In conclusion, Black Friday and Double 11 has their own culture behind, but the online selling strategy has many common points. With the deeply penetration of digitalization, the shopping digital platform will bring our life more different. 

What will be the future of inbound marketing?

https://www.kunocreative.com/blog/future-of-content-marketing

Marketing had radically change these last 10 years thanks to very innovative technology breakthrough. Marketers used to look for customers that would buy their products or services, but nowadays, they lead the customer directly to them.

I had the opportunity to see this change through discussion with my father who runs a marketing and communication agency.

I asked myself this following question many times:

What will be the future of inbound marketing?

I found some great takeaways through the article written by Carrie Dagenhard, a content analyst for a web development and SEO company.

So, what are the crucial components that are making inbound marketing better than ever?

    1)  Interactive content

Interactive contents are now a must to do as attention spans have considerably decreased. Interactive contents are very stimulating, and it is easier to engage readers instantly.

If you have a look on HubSpot’s The State of Inbound 2016, you will see that 42% of inbound marketers said that creating interactive content is at the top of their marketing priority. To outpace your competition, you will have to made interaction content a day to day habit.

              2)  The rise of « fake news »: Pay attention to what consumers say.

The phenomenon is such important that social media have taken measures to curb the spread of fakes news. On the same side a lot of content consumers have started doing their own fact-checking. It is very important for writers to pay attention to this point. It is important to be ethical and publish only researched content, because everyone today has access to information and could check fact instantly on the internet.

                3) Quality over quantity will reign

In 2011, since Google’s Panda algorithm got updated, great content marketers have been focusing on quality more than quantity. This algorithm, born in Febuary 2011, is devaluating the research result of low quality websites content.

The most successful brands will be those that put extra time and effort into their content.

           4) Content dabblers will waste a lot of money

« Brands that create content without a sound strategy and objective aren’t just going to waste their time, they are also going to waste money » said Joe Pulizzi the Content Marketing Institute founder.

According to Mr.Pulizi to do great content you have to :

-                  -Plan a full-fledged editorial calendar in your organization

-                  - Planned content strategy tied to company objectives

-                 - Put in place reliable method of measuring success.

If you are interested in having more insights have a look at his very interesting articles on : http://contentmarketinginstitute.com.

          5)  Content writers will need to pivot

As I mentioned before, content will change into different forms in the future and writers will need to acquire new skills to meet the expectation. Ability to write short but fascinating copy for interactive pieces and thoroughly investigated long-form articles that expose and uncover valuable and new information will become critical to their future.

          6)   Demand generation strategy will continue growing in complexity

Marketers know that they must continually learn and evolve their skills set and know how. But for a business that focus on increasing the sales with quality leads, all those changes might be frustrating and difficult to accept. Fantastic content worth nothing if nobody see it or have access to it. Through a mix of owned, earned and paid efforts, demand generation helps to win this challenge by attracting and leading prospects directly to your content.

It is very important to keep up with the complex and dynamic world of demand generation. You have two choices to carry out this work: Hire a team, but pay attention, that could be fastly expensive and time consuming or outsource to an experienced agency that can help you to achieve great success.

           7) The most engaging content will be Extra-long or Extra-Short

Shorter-style copy will be more and more usual. To illustrate it we can take the example of newspaper application on smartphones that regroup mainly small and shorten articles.

Long-form content will continue to be offered as ebooks for example, but we will still see long-form editorial-style in specialized publications like for example scientific publications, or on blogs.

« If the content is worth reading, your customers will value and share in-depth articles. »

You should vary the content length, but not in systematic ways, only when it makes senses.

To conclude we can argue that content marketing is not dying, it is more important than ever and these 7 elements helped me to figure out how content marketing will evolve in the future, and I hope that it will also help you to have a better understanding in how to right content like an expert.

Victor Huyghues Despointes and Axel Girard

Are robots through Artificial Intelligence will replace humans at marketing positions?

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/ai-marketing-use-cases

Since my first steps I have very often heard or seen that robots would sooner or later replace us as humans, as if robots and humans would necessarily fight each other at one point. This speculation has been mainly nurtured by science fiction books and movies as soon as 1927 with the movie from Fritz Lang, Metropolis or more recently with I, Robot from Alex Proyas in 2004. 

More than 20 years later, I wanted to see if this historical belief applied to what I do for now more than 2 years:  Digital Marketing  

So, I went through the Internet to find a constructive and well detailed answer (Quora, Medium …) to my following question:  Are robots through Artificial Intelligence will replace humans at marketing positions?

I eventually came across a great article written by Sophia Bernazzani from Hubspot: 

AI in Marketing: 10 Early Use Cases

This article did not purely answer my initial question. You must wonder why then I still want to talk about it … Simply because the powerful use cases used by the author convinced me that robots are and will be our friends as marketers! 

To make this article easier to read and concise I have decided to select only 5 important use cases 

So, what are those Early Use Cases mentioned by Sophia Bernazzani? Let’s start!

1) Website Design

Digital Marketing implies the use of internet and internet means “website” for any business. Can you exist without a good website nowadays? The answer is no!

However, creating a well-designed website is not something easy even more when you do not have a technical background … But guess what? It is over thanks to Artificial intelligence! 

Sophia Bernazzani takes the great example of “The Grid” that uses AI named Molly to automatically design websites. 

“Molly can build websites at a fraction of the time -- and cost -- it would require hiring a team of developers and software engineers to complete the same task”

You do not believe it? Have a look at The Grid.

2)Content Creation 

I am sure you will agree with me that content creation is one of the pillars of marketing. But again, who has never struggled at the time of writing good content? Personally, I do every time! How will it be perceived by readers?  Is it relevant to what my targeted customers want to see/get?

Artificial Intelligence can help you solving your fierce struggles to find the perfect word/sentence/title 

Some tools like Wordsmith and Quill are already being used by the likes of The Associated Press and Forbes to create clickable news content.  I tried both before writing this article, in a nutshell: super easy!!

Pre-existing templates (according to your keywords) can be filled in with personal text. You still have mistaken contents within your text or want to make it clearer and more concise? Use Hemingway App

No more excuses thanks to AI!

3) Marketing Automation

If I had to summarize marketing in one word I would say “customer”. A great marketing team is a team that has perfectly understood who are their perfect customers, admirably targeted them and reached them with the content that fit their needs the most.  

AI can help you to fulfill all those queries! 

Look at this perfect example brought by Sophia Bernazzani 

“Thanks to tools like Boomtrain, brands can send out customized email newsletters based on previous interactions recipients have had with content. AI helps send customized, personalized content recipients might be more likely to interact with -- and click through”.

4) Chatbots

Providing fast, perfect and easy to get answers to customers is something super important for any company. We could even say that it is an unbreakable rule!

But until now, it was unfortunately very costly to provide the right answer at the right time to the right customer for companies (call centers for example)

Chatbots seek to make the same process even easier for you and a way less costly. Bots based on machine learning are even better than humans as they are always improving themselves as soon as they interact with one of your customers.

You want to create a chatbot? Look at this super easy tutorial that will teach you how to create a chatbot on Chatfuel (for free and in 5 minutes, I swear!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O_BVZQYUFU

5) Advertising

My last struggle in marketing? Configuring advertising campaigns! How much do I have to bid for the lowest possible cost per click on Google AdWords? On which keyword should I bid? 

Again, AI is bringing peace in mind by automating your bids thanks to powerful algorithms.

Albert is doing so perfectly for you as an example.

As Sophia Bernazzani mentions “programming advertising will make up the majority of ad buying going forward, but Albert will handle the bidding, integration, management, and execution of ad campaigns across platforms -- from email, to search engines, to social media.”

Those 5 concrete use cases really changed my approach to what is the so called “Robotization”. They were spiritually my enemies they are now my best concrete friends as soon as I have to make marketing campaigns done!

Feel free to read other use cases about AI in marketing at: 

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/ai-marketing-use-cases

Axel Girard and Victor Huyghues Despointes