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It’s no secret that the martech industry is growing like crazy. Just look at how Scott Brinker’s annual martech landscape infographic has grown over the years — the evidence is undeniable. There are now about 5,000 company logos organized into categories like Social Media Marketing & Monitoring, Mobile Marketing, Dashboards & Data Visualization and more.But what’s it all mean? What are marketers supposed to take away from it, aside from knowing that the space is growing?As our recent Martech conference concluded in San Francisco, we asked Brinker and Anand Thaker — his partner this year in creating the landscape infographic — to answer those questions and take us behind the scenes to the thought process they used when trying to fit an entire industry into a one-page visual.“The landscape,” as Brinker says, “really only has one purpose, and that is to start the conversation for realizing how wide the scope of innovation is in the martech space.”Consider the conversation started…

Earlier this month, we wrapped up the West Coast edition of MarTech. The conference kicked off with the Stackies, an awards ceremony celebrating exceptional illustrations of marketing technology stacks from companies like Microsoft, Cisco and many more. I also unveiled the 2017 edition of the Marketing Technology Landscape, which now includes a whopping 5,381 solutions, up 40% from last year!Paul Revere, Red Sox, Clam Chowda and MarTech!If you missed MarTech in San Francisco, don’t worry! We’re heading back to Boston for the first time since 2014. If you’re passionate about marketing and getting the most from marketing technology, then plan to attend MarTech, October 2-4. Check out my short video invite. Take advantage of exceptional alpha ratesSave $400 by registering now. You’ll get the full MarTech experience: access to conference sessions, networking events, marketing technology vendors in the Expo Hall, event mobile app, hot meals, WiFi and more!Register today!As the martech world…

Augmented reality (AR) provider Blippar has announced what it says is the first-ever AR digital ad unit that doesn’t require an app.Called Augmented Reality Digital Placement (ARDP), it works inside standard rich media banner ad units on mobile devices or desktops/laptops, with no separate app required. The format will launch next month.A call to action in the delivered ad banner requests access to the device’s camera feed. The kind of call to action is determined creatively by the brand.The video from the camera is then inserted live into a “cut-out” area behind a 360-degree video image or a 3D model, such as a background street scene matted into a cutout of a car interior. (See above.) Essentially, it’s like a green screen using your device’s camera, employing a gyroscope for positioning when the device is a smartphone or tablet:[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

via Marketing Land

Datorama, which provides a central location for an organization’s advertising and marketing data, is boosting its artificial intelligence.This week, the company is announcing the launch of Datorama Genius, a built-in layer for its Marketing Integration Engine that surfaces insights about how to best achieve specified goals.Datorama says that its users have an average of 70 structured data streams coming into the platform from various sources of ad analytics or marketing tools. Previously, CMO Leah Pope told me, the platform has employed AI and machine learning to perform such foundational tasks as organizing incoming data for embedded data models.Now, the Genius layer adds the ability to find insights that can boost performance. Genius’s key focus, Pope said, is answering such questions as “Why is this happening?” and “What can we do about our performance?”[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

via Marketing Land

One of the fundamental premises of marketing automation is email engagement. And as modern marketers, we are under serious pressure for our emails to perform — they must drive engagement, conversions, and most importantly, revenue.But with the sophistication of the various tools at our fingertips and an overcrowded work desk, it’s easy to overlook the fundamentals of email performance. Below is a checklist of 12 tips and techniques to inspire new email marketers and remind seasoned professionals about the key best practices.1. Humanize your communicationsEmails sent from a person (e.g., “Mary Wallace”) engage far better than emails sent from a company (e.g. “Wallace Consulting”) — unless, of course, you are a well-known and recognized brand like Banana Republic.2. Stay away from average-length subject linesA key driver of email open rates, subject lines perform best when either long or short. Subject lines that are 60 to 70 characters drive neither open rates nor click-through engagem…

Christmas, Black Friday weekend, back-to-school, Valentine’s Day — these are what most people think about when it comes to critical times for retailers to capture consumer dollars.But e-commerce advertisers also have focused on Memorial Day weekend, with data from past years showing increased Facebook ad budgets in the sector going to Dynamic Ads, as well as overall CPMs (cost per impressions) and click-through rates rising.As with past columns, the data outlined here is based on my work at Nanigans. This time around, we specifically examined the same set of e-commerce advertisers on Facebook across a four-month period in both 2015 and 2016.To look at how the Memorial Day holiday impacted larger pricing and action trends, we compared aggregate activity during the week leading up to and following Memorial Day each year with the prior three-month period.The analysis demonstrated how e-commerce ad prices on Facebook rise a fairly notable amount during the Memorial Day timeframe:While thi…

We send emails for a lot of reasons. Sales teams send them to generate new leads. Content marketers send them to try to get a link or encourage an influencer to share something on one of their social accounts.Point is, we rely heavily on emails to try to convince others to do something for us. Unfortunately, someone’s inbox isn’t always the most persuasive channel. Researchers at Northwestern University School of Law found that online communication like emails has a limiting effect on persuasion.But don’t panic! In this post, I’ll walk you through 10 easy tricks that will help you overcome common obstacles — like how to spark interest and motivate action — in order to get your content from the bottom of someone’s inbox to their front page.1. Identify targets with high engagement that already promote similar contentThis is one of the most time-consuming parts of the outreach process, but trust me, the effort is worth it.The key to ensure a high ROI from your outreach efforts is to targ…

Have you heard of Google’s “Project Owl” yet?If not, then you’re in for some fun, because this is a hoot.Let’s start at the beginning.Fall of 2016: Trump gets nominated to the presidency.Still in fall of 2016: All around the world, people are asking “WHO? WHAT? HOW?” That’s when researchers found that American voters were influenced by misinformation on the internet.The world is completely distressed. They demand that 1) someone be responsible and 2) for them to take action and fix the ‘fake news’ problem.Oh – hi Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg.Who else other than Google and Facebook, right?The public wants solutions from search engines and social media giants to tackle ‘fake news’ and any other misinformation on the internet.May 2017: TA-DA! Welcome Project Owl.Project Owl is introduced as Google’s answer to addressing fake news. It plans to do this with new feedback forms for search suggestions and the answer box, and authoritative content prioritization in the answer box.And no, we …

Conventional wisdom within ad tech is that search is boring. In the display ecosystem, life is exciting: in the last decade alone, thousands of niche companies have emerged, nearly as many have folded, and major new technologies have come and gone. In contrast, search seems dull: it’s still the best-performing and highest-spending channel by far, but the makeup of the industry and the basic way in which ads get delivered haven’t changed much. So despite its massive importance to marketers, search is never the sexy topic at conferences or a frequent mention in industry articles.As a result, the industry has missed one of the most powerful changes in the last decade of ad tech: the rise of people-based search. In the last year, with little fanfare, Google has launched two features that dramatically expand the power of search marketing: “Customer Match” and “In Store Conversions.”Customer MatchCustomer Match is a tool that allows marketers to use first-party data to optimize their bids a…

Consider the video ads that Pinterest debuted last summer a pilot for the type it’s now premiering.Pinterest is rolling out Promoted Videos that will play automatically without sound and appear in people’s feeds, within search results and within the Related Pins galleries beneath individual pins, the company announced on Wednesday. As with the click-to-play Promoted Videos that Pinterest introduced in August 2016, the ads will only show up in Pinterest’s mobile apps.Pinterest is testing the autoplay video ads with several brands, including Adidas, L’Oreal, Toyota, Universal Pictures and Visa, and plans to open them up to all advertisers some time “in the coming months” to buy through Pinterest’s self-serve ad-buying tool or advertising API or directly from the company’s sales team, according to a company blog post. The videos can be up to 30 minutes long and in any format, though Pinterest recommends they be vertical or square, said a Pinterest spokesperson.When Pinterest rolled out P…

Today’s consumers research products on the go, using their smartphones to find and choose at which nearby business to make a purchase or eat a meal. Most visit the store they select on the same day.Yet most marketers can’t – or don’t – optimize their digital presence or measure the impact of their digital campaigns on in-store sales.On June 6th, join our digital marketing experts as they explore online and offline connections across multiple digital channels. They’ll discuss best practices to drive foot traffic, plus key metrics to measure the impact of digital search marketing, organic search, social media, and ad campaigns on top-line growth.Register today for “Mobile Marketing vs. In-Store Sales: Help! What’s the Correlation?,” produced by Digital Marketing Depot and sponsored by MomentFeed.

via Marketing Land

Here’s our recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web.From Marketing Land:5 reasons why websites still matter to local search in 2017
May 23, 2017 by Wesley Young
More and more small local businesses are using social media profile pages, rather than websites, as the main face of their operation. Columnist Wesley Young explains why this isn’t the good idea that it may seem to be.Stop overloading your Local SEO content!
May 23, 2017 by Greg Gifford
Developing content for your local business website is clearly important for search engine optimization, but that doesn’t mean that more content is always better. Columnist Greg Gifford explains and suggests an alternative strategy.Getting ahead of the game with predictive analytics
May 23, 2017 by Nick Iyengar
Think predictive analytics is out of reach for your organization? Think again. Columnist Nick Iyengar outlines what you’ll need to get started and describes two real-w…

Search Engine Land’s always sold-out SMX Advanced, the only search marketing conference designed exclusively for experienced search marketers, returns to Seattle June 12-14.Keep reading to find out what’s in store this year. Then register; fewer than 200 spots are left!New trends, new opportunities and new challengesChange is constant in search marketing. Opportunities emerge faster than they can be absorbed: new targeting capabilities, new mobile-first indexes, the explosion of voice search. Even veteran marketers are perpetually catching up with what is possible.SMX Advanced delivers expert-level tactics you’ll put to work immediately to harness the opportunities and cope with the challenges. It’s your survival guide to the dynamic and tumultuous world of search marketing.Advanced SEO for fun & profitWe’ll kick off the SEO track by unveiling of The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors: 2017 Edition, our comprehensive examination of search ranking factors that are influencing re…

Why are we still having this discussion? Because data show that a surprising number of businesses still don’t have a website. Surveys from as recently as October 2016 find that close to half of all small businesses don’t have a website, and it’s not just solo work-from-home moonlighters, either.Specifically, a Capital One survey of 400 small businesses  — its Fall 2016 Small Business Barometer Survey — found that only 56 percent have a company website. And only 53 percent of those were mobile-optimized. In other words, fewer than 30 percent of businesses surveyed had a mobile-optimized website.Further, there is a fair argument that websites are no longer as effective in the local market. Technology and cost certainly are no longer barriers given the availability of subscription options for even the least sophisticated users and slick DIY platforms for those who don’t want to hire a freelancer or agency. Instead, the challenge is that websites must compete for relevance in a market wit…

I’ve been spending a lot of time on the road, speaking at conferences and talking to marketers and business owners, and I’ve been having the “content” talk far too often lately. You know, the one that’s almost as awkward as sitting down with your kids to talk about the birds and the bees, but where you’re talking to a business owner and telling them that their last SEO agency duped them.For some reason, more than ever before, it seems like most business owners (and many marketers) are equating content with SEO. It’s like suddenly, the only thing that matters is content, content, CONTENT. If multiple pages aren’t added to the site every month, then obviously, no SEO has been performed.Hopefully, everyone reading this knows that the “content, content, CONTENT” play is way off-base. The problem is that most business owners don’t know, and many of us aren’t doing a sufficient job of educating business owners to show them why. If there’s a huge disconnect between what marketers know and b…