Study: Promoted tweets beat organic tweets by 160%

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Some research by the guys at Convertro gives valuable insights to marketers in terms of paid social media. Compared to other platforms, paid tweets are more successful than organic tweets. The study shows that promoted tweets converted better than twice to organic tweets. However, YouTube is best in introducing new products and supporting consumers purchase decisions.

The report analyzed some 500 million clicks and 15 million conversions during the first quarter of 2014. It tracked the performance of social purchase interactions via the Convertro’s attribution technology amongst their user base. The results show that promoted tweets converted at 3.9%. The unpaid tweets received only a 1.5% figure which makes a difference of 160% that paid tweets generate.

Convertro-AOL-Social-Network-Paid Media

The variance of results can not be seen on Facebook though were paid status updates got achieved 3.1% versus unpaid status updates of 3.0%. Even worse were the figures on Pinterest were paid posts converted with only 0.2% compared to moneyless posts which received 1.1%. So, Pinterest probably needs to rethink their advertising model when unpaid posts (over 80% more successful) do more for marketers than paid posts.

Spot On!
If it wasn’t Twitter, the questions for paid social media would probably even be higher. However, if we look at the overall figure, it is clear that paid posts increase conversion rates by almost 25% – at least according to the stats by Convertro. Maybe you have made your own tests and advertising campaigns with paid social media. If so, maybe let us know if your figures show similar results.

What makes a great brand? (SlideShare)

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The team at We Are Social have created an interesting presentation on “What Makes A Great Brand”. However, I can already hear some of you social geeks saying, moaning and arguing what is missing in the slides and what you could better, maybe start reading and thinking about it first, and then try to find some more brands that have changed the way customer perceive brands today.

The slideshare presentation comes from a a project done in cooperation between We Are Social and The World Federation of Advertisers on Project Reconnect. This initiative was created to understand brands with a deeper meaning by listening to what people really want from brands and advertising. The idea behind it was to align marketers practice and customer expectations. Viewers get to know insights made while talking with marketers about inspiring marketing trends and approaches.

Click on the button to load the content from www.slideshare.net.

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Websites that teens love (Infographic)

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Are teens real trendsetters when it comes to using the latest online gig or social networks? Well, Niche gives some insights into the websites that 7.000 high school graduates in the U.S. were using lately.

Although many of us would have thought that Facebook is not the biggest hype for them any longer, the interactive infographic provided by Niche proves that 87% of the graduates are still happy with reading their news and being active on Facebook. Instagram makes up 66% and Twitter is used by 55%.

In terms of quick chat platforms, 72% use Facebook Messenger and 65% are active on Snapchat. Those platforms that are said to be the latest trend like YikYak and Whisper are not really getting big activity rates – 97% and 95% don’t use these platforms.

From a broadcasting point of view, it is interesting to see that YouTube, Netflix, and Pandora are the leading edge platforms whereas Hulu, Spotify and Beats like Amazon Prime are not yet their main interest spot.

PS: The interactive infographic with further info can be seen at Business Insider.

Websites Teens Niche 2014

Why 'A' marketers are better than the rest (Infographic)

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Although many marketers have heard of the analytics, data and technology challenges, a minority of 26% of marketers understand their value for the business they run. This is the latest results of a joint study from VisionEdge Marketing (VEM) and ITSMA Marketing Performance Management (MPM) with input from 380 marketers gives insights on marketing performance and best-practices.

The study shows how marketers can earn an “A” grade from the C-suite as they understand impact on data for business. The outperforming marketers know how to make performance management a priority. They know how to plan and implement a well-defined and documented road map for performance improvement. While many marketers measure effort and activity, these “A” grade marketers find the right metrics on ROI efficiency, while building dashboards in order to communicate business benefits of their efforts.

Not surprisingly, “A” grade marketers know how to align their marketing objectives with business priorities, which are the basis for selecting the right metrics. They understand why their offerings create a bi-directional benefit for customers and shareholders.

Of the top performers, 63% claimed increased customer share of wallet. This is a massive success when compared with 48% of “B” marketers and 38% of low performing marketers. When monitoring improvements for business growth, 54% of “A” respondents confirmed improvements in their win rates. This stands against 39% of the “B” competitors and 25% of laggard marketers.

However, some of you marketers might think you should have the ROI in focus, the “B” grade marketers
are too much looking for sales figures. They are spot on getting leads for their pipeline and try to map the customer journey intensively. Still, they lose the big picture of the long-term web strategy. The lazy laggard marketers just see the production of marketing campaigns as their target instead of producing and generating real business results, according to the study.

ITSMA-VEMMPM-Study-2014

Catch Up! Essential Skills of Modern Marketers (Infographic)

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If you are a great marketer, you always want to be ahead of the curve with your marketing team. But what talent ingredients does it need today to be among the leading experts of modern marketing? eMarketer has just come up with their latest “Skills of the Modern Marketer” report.

In this report we get to know the skills that senior marketers have to achieve or to be coached for in order to manage their teams correct supported by the latest trends. And it becomes clear that it is not only about knowing the right marketing tactics and trends, we also have to shape our personality with empathy, adaptability and collaboration skills. And furthermore, it has become a challenge to understand the latest marketing technologies and how they can foster the ROI of your business.

The following infographic summarizes the report and the findings, based on interviews and a survey with senior level marketers.

eMarketer Essential Skills Modern Marketer Infographic

Report: Most Trusted Marketing Automation Tools

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Marketing automation tools are making their ways into the business world, not only for large enterprises but also for small companies some solutions have proven to be promising, and not only since IBM bought Silverpop. However, which tools are the right ones for your business? At least we get some advice now from TrustRadius‘ “Buyer’s Guide to Marketing Automation Software”. They did a report based on 400 in-depth reviews by authenticated end-users of marketing automation products combined with the results of more than 10,000 comparisons performed on the TrustRadius’ website.

The report looked at software solutions that include various demand generation capabilities like email campaign management, landing pages,or even lead scoring. However, the analysis out those providers which just offer one aspect of marketing automation (i.e. only lead scoring). In their focus were those tools that “help to automate and scale repetitive marketing tasks and the analysis of those efforts.”

These were the findings they came up with…

Small Businesses (Up to 50 employees)
Small companies gave quite positive and high ratings with at least a 4 out of 5 (average was 4.3 out of 5 – better than the average in the midsize and enterprise companies). Then TrustRadius ranked the products via two factors: a) average user rating and b) how does the product serve the business segment (determined by the number of comparisons made by organizations of that size).
The leading 3 solutions were HubSpot (4.8, 69% of comparisons by small businesses), Act-On (4.7, 53%), plus Infusionsoft (4.3, 96%). Other solutions like Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, and Silverpop also got good ratings. Still, they ranked lower as they had a smaller proportion of small business comparisons.

TrustRadius Marketing Automation Small Business 2014

SMB Businesses (From 51 to 500 employees)
The average rating in the midsize company category was 3.9 out of 5. The report shows that a higher demand goes alongside bigger companies and more complex requirements for marketing automation tools. Here, the trusted vendors are Marketo (4.2, 60% midsize category) and Pardot (4.0, 58%). Act-On, Eloqua, and HubSpot also got positive ratings.

TrustRadius Marketing Automation SMB 2014

Enterprise Businesses (500+ employees)
The average rating for enterprise marketing automation products was 3.8 out of 5. Eloqua showed up to be the top marketing automation software for enterprise companies (4.4, 59% enterprise focus). Act-On, HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot also performed well according to users, but they had a smaller proportion of comparisons from enterprise customers.

TrustRadius Marketing Automation Enterprises 2014

Tell us about your findings. Which tools do you use and what has proven to be successful for you? All insights can help other companies make faster decisions.

What makes consumers share personal data with brands?

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Getting personal data is something most companies strive for. However, consumers are very careful with sharing their information with marketers. Most of them (62%) fear that marketers don’t obey the rules of data privacy. This is the main finding of a recent report from SDL, based The report was based on data from a survey of more than 4,000 consumers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Not surprisingly, younger consumers are not that frightened about the way marketers work with their data than older consumers. In the UK, just 48% of the 18-24 year old respondents worry about it versus 63% of the 45-54 year olds. The US is less open with data sharing in the younger generation. 59% of the respondents between 18-29 years worry about data privacy. This compares to 71% of the age group 45-60 years.

SDL Data Personalized Data 2014

There is also a big gap between what data people share and what not. Data about age, gender, and income is more openly shared with marketers. Respondents made clear that they are less open to share the name of their spouse, lists of family and friends, and obviously their Social Security number.

SDL Data Smartphone Shopping 2014It seems that loyalty programs are still a great hook for marketers. In order to being able to join a loyalty program 49% of respondents were willing to share personal information with brands. Furthermore, free products and services in exchange for data still gets 41% sharing personal data.

Still, the fear of being tracked gets people away from sharing their data online, especially when it comes to in-store tracking. Most respondents (76%) with smartphones replied they are not happy with retailers’ tracking their shopping tours as they do not understand what the intention of the tracking effort will be.

Spot On!
SDL Data Trusted Brands 2014Trusted brands are in a comfortable situation: 79% of respondents stated they are more likely to hand over personal data to those brands they have purchased from before. Obviously, this changes in percentage from country to country with the UK being most hesitant about sharing information Almost one third would not share any information with marketers. The report is a good indicator on what kind of structured data is easy to generate, but also shows the challenge of getting sensitive data from consumers.

Native Advertising: Will these brands turn the advertising industry around?

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Last year, I had the pleasure to announce this gentleman for one of the main dmexco stage panels. And I can tell you, it was not fun to complement him to go off stage when their speaking time was up. Terence Kawaja is a funny character and great speaker, and he doesn’t like being stopped talking. Now, the investment banker and founder of LUMA Partners introduced his latest chart of the Lumascapes which will define a new status quo in the advertising industry.

After their numerous Lumascapes on search, display, video, mobile, social commerce, and so on, this time we get to see their perception world of native advertising. Although the definition on native advertising is still evolving and may seem some kind of “rough in barriers” and not very much detailed, it is making it’s way through the brand campaigns of companies. Not even the IAB playbook on native advertising gives us a clear definition on what exactly native advertising is, and how it differs from content marketing, branded content, or even how it can be located against approaches like story advertising.

To the guys of Business Insider, Kawaja said about his latest version…

“Given how consumers ignore banner ads, these new consumer – friendly formats are proving to be the engine for how marketers can engage audiences, especially in social and mobile contexts.”

Let’s hope he his right with his perception. I realized some brands of emerging companies are missing in the chart, maybe as it is an American view, maybe because we are often getting invites to the latest new start-up in this field, maybe as we see the world a bit different. Still, Kawaja and his team have done a good job again. Let’s hope he is joining dmexco 2014 again.

Lumascape Native Advertising

Content: Secrets of a killer blogpost (Infographic)

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Many marketing, PR or product managers think about starting their own blogs when joining one of our inhouse or open seminars. And for most of them, it has become a challenge just finding the right topic that makes them outstanding with their product or service offering. This is not surprising, bearing in mind that there were already 74.874.233 WordPress websites out there when I wrote this post – and when you think about Blogger, Typepad, Tumblrs and all of those enterprise blogs, it becomes a mission impossible to find a niche that helps building brands.

Now, the guys at WhoIsHostingThis.com have published some helpful infographic which give us some quite good arguments on what matters when you start blogging.

Which Content?
There is no magazine without a smashing title. Ideally, you write about the topics you are an expert in. As people will want credible, meaningful and authentic blog posts, this is the only way to get your readers attention. Then, check out what readers do want, discuss and share on your topic via social media monitoring. This will make your content interesting and will prevent you from writing content that nobody reads.

Original or Curated?

If you have got the time to write original content, go for it. It’s the best for your reputation and shows your own mindset. And most importantly, Google likes original content which is more likely to rank better. Whenever, there are guest bloggers who want to contribute to your website, invite them.
However, the truth is that if you curate your competitor’s content or third party content from time to time (with a back link!), you jump into their fish-bowl. The easiest bit is if you use their infographics, webinars and branded industry blogs to expand their ideas and thoughts.

Consistency? 

Find your style and stick with it. People want to feel “at home” and comfortable. Figure out when most people share your updates, or when it’s better not to send them live. If you can afford it, stick to an editorial calendar as people love publishing source they can rely on finding the relevant set of information that stands out.

Good luck (and if you need help), we are here to advice…

How-to-Write-a-Successful-Blog-Post

Study 2014: What marketers see as their top priorities

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Obviously, all marketers are ROI-driven – or made to think that way. Not surprising then, the top priority in digital marketing comes to be increasing the conversion rates (47%), followed by increasing/improving brand awareness (46%) and collecting/measuring/using behavior-based data (29%). This is the outcome of the latest study by ExactTarget entitled “2014 State of Marketing”. The report, conducted between October and November 2013, gives insights from over 2,600 global marketers.

ExactTarget-2014-top-priorities-exacttarget

Although I would have expected from our conversations with clients that demand generation comes in as one of the top priorities, only 28% of the marketers said acquiring new subscribers, improving channels (24%) and leveraging actionable data is among their main challenges for 2014.

ExactTarget-2014-success-metrics

The good sign for publishers, consultants, advertising platforms and marketing service providers is that 98% of responding marketers plan to increase or maintain their digital marketing budgets. The rise in digital marketing spends goes primarily to data and analytics (61%), marketing automation (61%), email marketing (58%), social media marketing (57%), and content management (57%).

ExactTarget-2014-budgets

Spot On!
It would actually be interesting to have a study that asks marketers what they define as social media marketing. Why? Interestingly enough, only 34% of those marketers find ROI in social media marketing. As of a lack of definition, we cannot argue whether there is a misunderstanding in the definition or in the company’s approach to social media. Still, only 52% think their social media activities will actually pay out in ROI. But when Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are cited as the most popular social channels for the respondents, I doubt that their social media approach is properly understood. At least there are positive signs when the repondents see that Google+ gets more impact with 18% planning to start in 2014.