It may be time to start rethinking the purchase funnel. Engaging with media, discovering and researching brands, and making purchase decisions are no longer limited by time and place. Consumers now engage in similar activities across several different screens, and the choice of screen affects each purchasing decision’s path.
So it’s important that marketers engage their audiences by placing the right tone and message in the right environment, all while preserving a cohesive experience.
The study defines a multi-screen consumer as someone between the ages of 18 and 64 who accesses the internet at least two times each week using both computer and smartphone, a group that now includes about 33 million Americans. It’s a desirable target audience, too: They have higher discretionary income and higher mean household income than average.
Information unbound
Several trends emerge from the data, many of which emphasize consumers’ growing desire for control over their experiences. For example, half of these multi-screen people use a DVR for watching television. Most (70 percent) use their phone to find information while on the go. Even networked game consoles are put into the service of this goal, with 23 percent using it to watch video and 39 percent using it to socialize.
In fact, gamers are the category to watch for predicting the future. Compared to other groups, they tend to be social influences who spend fewer hours passively absorbing content, and more time interacting with content and connecting with others as they play games, send text messages, and post reviews or comment on blogs.
The year of display; when good brands get bad press; location bonanza; tweeting up a storm and more
Will this be the year for display?
A new report from the Rubicon Project says it just might be. CPMs among the optimization firm’s top 20 index have surged 47% from the start of this year to date, according to a report from BrandWeek.
The power of “negative” buzz
What happens when your time-honored brand suddenly gets associated with something… unsavory? What do you do? Earlier this week, Edgar Valdez, also known as “La Barbie,” the suspected kingpin of a notorious Mexican drug cartel, was arrested by authorities while wearing a famous-name polo shirt. Time to rebrand, or just ignore it?
Location: the next digital bonanza?
“Now that Facebook has entered the location-based services market, ‘places’—and the information generated by users about those places—is the next digital bonanza.” So writes Sheila Shayon on Brandchannel.com. But where to go next? Invoking Flickr founder Caterina Fake’s new startup Hunch.com, which uses Twitter and Facebook polling data to better target users’ desires, Shayon offers six tips on how to get your locale-based offerings to the right customers.
A verification bill of rights
As networks and demand-side platforms have grown ever larger, writes Goodway Group COO, Jay Friedman on Adotas, advertisers’ control over where their ads appear has flown out of control. “And when something is out of human control, someone is going to cheat,” he notes, citing malware, nudity and profanity ads as chief culprits. He proposes an eight “amendment” bill of rights for advertisers to help ensure the appropriate ad shows up at the appropriate place. Number one: “You have every right to know that your ads only appeared within the provided site list during and after the campaign, and to see the URLs of any sites on which your ads appeared outside of that pre-approved site list.” Not exactly “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…” but a compelling idea.
In the afternoon, partners split up into separate tracks: Search Partners and Integrated Partners. Here are a few highlights from the afternoon sessions:
Retail Pulse, the monthly report that taps into Yahoo! data to track changes in U.S. online shopping trends, confirms that back-to-school shopping started earlier than in 2009:
“Back to School” searches on Yahoo! entered the top term list as early as the first week of July.
Search for “backpacks” on retailer sites surged after July 5.
Users who visited Office Supplies sites also increased over four consecutive weeks.
Women’s passion for fashion
The report also highlighted that search in the Apparel category has increased over four consecutive weeks, recovering from a four-month slide. Specifically, Yahoo! Shopping click volume in the Clothing category saw an up-trend. The number of women aged 18-49 who visited sites in the Department Store category has also increased since July 5.
Distributing your original content can lead to greater engagement and increased sales
It’s no secret that creating original content for your website is a terrific way to get your marketing messages across, establish yourself as an expert, and humanize your company and its employees.
By writing articles, blogs and white papers, companies can offer a real service to their current and potential customers and clients. It is essential, though, that the content be well-written, informative and understandable for your target audience. It is worth the investment to either have an accomplished copywriter on your staff, or to seek the services of a professional copywriter.
Creating meaningful content is just the first step, though. The key is delivering that content to as wide an audience as you can. Fortunately, there are many online platforms through which you can distribute your original content.
Properly marketing your content across multiple platforms requires an investment of time and money , but that investment is often rewarded with a spectacular return, as increases in viewers frequently translate to increases in clients, customers and revenues.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds
An RSS feed is a simple way to “subscribe” to a blog, the same way you would subscribe to a magazine. You can use a program called an RSS reader (Bloglines and the one provided on your MyYahoo! page are popular and easy-to-use examples) to subscribe to blogs. Once you’ve subscribed, you don’t have to check each site individually—just fire up your RSS reader, and you’ll see all of the new content that’s been created since the last time you checked.
Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and others
If your company has a social media account (or multiple accounts) on a service such as Twitter or Facebook, use it to announce the publication of your latest content piece. Virtually all social media accounts allow you to hyperlink directly to your online content. If your friends or followers like the content piece, they are also likely to tell people in their networks about it, creating an ever-growing audience.
Online ad spend rises (again); telling stories in social, Quaker’s new campaign; kill the buzzwords and more
Online ad spend to outpace ad spend on other gadgets and media
Online ad spend will grow 14% next year to nearly 60 billion smackers, while the overall market is expected to increase just 5%. And the fastest growing slice of the digital pie will be local (60%), with targeted display offering the second-fastest-growing slice (50%). This according to a forecast released by Borrell Associates and reported in AdWeek. Do you know a company that does display and local really well? We do.
Give your social media posts a little panache
Think you can’t develop a story in 140 or fewer characters? Think again. Writing on ClickZ, Heidi Cohen offers five tips on how companies can imbue their social media posts with a story line, and another five on the attributes of developing a ripping yarn on same.
Earth Quaker
We all know the value of a good breakfast. When we were kids, it was “toast, juice, milk and…” whatever breakfast cereal was being pushed. But “does your breakfast make you amazing?” Quaker Oats say theirs does, or is about to. The venerable cereal company is about to embark on its “amazing” campaign, and Quaker CMO Kristen Lynch gives the details in AdWeek. An amazing breakfast should help humans go.
Video: Industry Experts Share Tips for Targeting Women Online
Listen to key insights from The Women Connectonomics Study
Did you know that women will control $28 trillion in annual spending globally by 2014?
We did. That’s why Yahoo! researchers surveyed thousands of women to create The Women Connectonomics study. It’s a definitive look at the needs the Internet fulfills for women, why they turn to certain online channels and how receptive they are to advertising messages on various sites. Key study findings include:
The top needs for women revolve around personal growth and their interdependencies on others.
Women’s lifestyle sites like Yahoo! Shine and special interest sites fulfill the most needs for women.
Women are three times more receptive to marketing messages on lifestyle, specialty and review sites.
The study was released in late July at a Chicago event attended by industry leaders like top bloggers, CMOs, and key agency executives. Check out their expert tips for helping your brand connect with women online.
Tough choices between PPC and SEO, and how to become a search marketing pro
Lee Odden, Mike Grehan and pals at the Black Hat, White Hat cocktail party
Day three of the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco was, admittedly, a bit of a graveyard. We reckon that, after the Yahoo! | Bing cocktail hour on Tuesday and the Black Hat, White Hat Un-conference soirée on Wednesday, people needed a bit of a rest. But the future goes to the hearty and the hearty showed up. So here are a couple of final tips to live by in the digital marketing world.
Do you have to choose?
The session “PPC vs. SEO” was set up as a debate to determine which is the more effective method of getting traffic. Melanie Mitchell, the SVP of Search Strategy at Digitas, argued that paid search allows you to “own the presentation,” as Toyota effectively did during its period of bad PR in ’09 and ’10, using PPC ads to push down the page news items about recalls. She also showed how Delta Airlines’ tickets sold and incremental revenue rose and fell as the company increased and decreased its PPC spend on brand keywords. In the end, Mitchell said, “PPC and organic don’t cannibalize each other, and using both together results in significant lift for both, as it enables you to reach the entire search audience.”
Quantity over quality: As a devotee of SEO, Rand Fishkin, the CEO of SEOmoz.org, stated that while PPC has a 20% higher conversion rate than SEO, SEO gets 7.3X the clicks that PPC does. Paid search providers also enforce a bunch of restrictions on ad copy, where as what you put in your meta data is your own choice. Still, he admitted, PPC is easier to use and easier to test, but that fact increases the number of competitors you have. In other words, a lot of firms get scared off by the work required for effective SEO.
Become a search marketing pro
Appropriately, the last session we attended at SES covered advanced paid search tactics, giving the audience a slew of useful takeaways. David Rodnitzky, Founder and CEO of PPC Associates, offered seven tips for getting your campaigns to the next level: 1) Use the right engines (have search and content keywords in different campaigns and optimize each separately); 2) Use the right keywords (the “long tail” is highly overrated—do “keyword sculpting” by creating targeted landing pages, copy, geo-targeting and dayparting); 3) Use the right bids (you can’t “set it and forget it”); 4) Use the right ad copy (engines’ maps, shopping and other features to gain more real estate); 5) Use the right landing pages (test headlines, buttons, conversion funnel, video, benefit statements—this can provide more lift than anything else); 6) Use the right tracking (purchase latency can be as high as 60%); and 7) Use the right targeting (it can turn bad keywords into good ones).
Innovation the name of the game at the 2010 Yahoo! Partner Summit, Part I
Did you know that, in addition to 621 million users each month, Yahoo! has more than 1,700 active partners in nearly every corner of the globe? These partners include content, search, advertising, toolbar, mobile, local, broadband and more, in a relationship that embraces openness and benefits advertisers and consumers.
You’ve heard the old adage, “competition ensures quality.” Well, at Yahoo! we believe that cooperation can also help ensure quality, while open dialogue can help spur innovation. That’s why August 16, we invited 140 of our partners from 17 countries to come together at our Sunnyvale campus for the 2010 Yahoo! Partner Summit to share knowledge, get a sneak peak of the innovations coming down the pike, do a little networking and have some fun.
Here’s just a smattering of what was shared during the first half of the Summit:
SVP Raymond Stern and VPs Wendi Sturgis and Finnegan Faldi kicked off the proceedings. Raymond noted that this was our first truly global Yahoo! Partner Summit, while Wendi said that this year’s summit, much larger than any previous, showed how Yahoo! is “evolving its focus on partners.” Citing our 400-plus search partners in the U.S. alone and 860 worldwide, plus our more than 500 integrated partners in North America alone and many more around the globe, the group demonstrated how partners are critical to Yahoo’s raison d’etre. Faldi talked about building trust and transparency between Yahoo! and its partners, deepening those ties and and expanding collaborative initiatives.
CEO Carol Bartz took the stage first and was later joined by EVP Hilary Schneider for a Q&A. She talked about Yahoo!’s commitment to innovation. “We spend most of our time,” Carol said, “trying to figure out the future paradigm of the Internet.” Carol touted the Today Module on the Yahoo! frontpage, noting that the module serves up 32,000 different permutations at any given moment, 1 million per day, doubling the frontpage clickthrough rate.
Other fun Bartz facts:
According to eye tracking studies, men tend to be blind to banner ads but like ads in the lower left; women and teens tend to like banners.
Provoking laughs, Carol noted that male teens are lying when they say in focus groups that they only care about games and ignore celebrity gossip of the kind Yahoo! serves on omg! “We know they do,” she said. “We have the data.”
Illustrating Yahoo!’s commitment to a global platform that meets local needs (buzzword of the day: “glocal”), Carol noted that 95% of purchases occur within 5 miles of the home, making so-called “tail content” vital now and in the long term.
Yahoo! Mail processes 100 billion emails a month while stopping 500 billion spam emails, all while serving 10 billion ads per day.
Carol noted that Yahoo! is committed to superior targeting in which advertisers will be able to buy audiences rather than mere demographics.
The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is on track and going well. Organic search in the United States and English results in Canada began transitioning this week. (For more on this click over the Yahoo! Advertising blog.)
Notable Quote: Ever provocative (just the way we like her), Carol noted that she’d gone through “one-and-a half years of scrutiny” in the media during her tenure as Yahoo!’s CEO, saying, “I don’t get up in the morning wondering what off color things I’m going to say.” (True to that, Carol’s Curse Count for the session was a mere 3 swear words.)
Evil hides within seemingly innocent search results
Every time you use the Internet, you’re at risk from viruses, spyware and other malware. It’s just like taking a long flight—you get to where you’re going, but it’s difficult to avoid catching everyone else’s cough in the meantime. And this tends to be a hidden problem when using search engines, because people generally trust the provider and often don’t think to question the results.
Knowledge is power
To learn more about the situation, Barracuda Labs conducted a study across Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Twitter. The global research and threat analysis team inspected trending topics to identify the topics most often used by malware distributors, because the bad guys like to disguise themselves as relevant search results. Search engines constantly hunt for them and block this junk, but sometimes they sneak through for a short time.
During the study’s time period, Barracuda Labs found that the top ten search terms used as bait by evildoers include the names of three actresses, an NFL player, a Playboy playmate and a guy who faked his way into Harvard University. Over half of the discovered malware had originated between 4:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. GMT, and by a slim margin most of it was on a Tuesday.
Gamers lead the way for multi-screen consumers
