Marketing Google

As influencer marketing matures, the agencies and strategists who favor the tactic are finally starting to wake up to the fact that true ROI comes from engagement — not reach.Many are predicting that “the influencer bubble” is primed to burst in 2018, and in my book, it’s about time. Not that I’m opposed to influencer marketing when it’s done right. Forging real, mutually beneficial, long-term relationships with people who have engaged, relevant audiences? There’s arguably no more effective way to get a brand message out into the world.It’s the influencer hype machine, with its vanity metrics and media-buying marketplace mentality, that I’m eager to see go down. Treating sponsored Instagram posts as another advertising channel, with success measured according to CPMs? That’s just folly.And yet the money keeps pouring in, as this data visualization from Santa Monica, Calif.-based influencer agency Mediakix illustrates:Last fall, Digiday’s Grace Caffyn asked an anonymous influencer agen…

Once again, Apple’s got everyone in a tizzy — and no, I’m not talking about the $999 price tag on the new iPhone X. I’m referring to its latest iOS mobile operating system update, which takes cookie-blocking to a whole new level and will drastically impact a brand’s ability to maintain direct relationships with its customers.As you may remember, early this summer Apple launched Intelligent Tracking Prevention, a feature for its Safari web browser that blocks third-party cookies by default. With the new iOS 11, first-party cookies take a hit, too. They’re now restricted to a tiny 24-hour window for retargeting, and after 30 days, they totally depreciate, disappearing into a veritable customer data black hole, never to be found again.The update brings Apple one step closer in its decade-long quest to make cookies obsolete — a perilous development for the 91 percent of marketers that still rely primarily on cookies to identify users and build customer profiles.But while six industry trad…

A multinational startup is planning on using blockchain-generated crytocurrency to pay its influencers — and to let its influencers pay their followers.Founded last year, the Warsaw-based indaHash has seven offices worldwide for its work with brands and 300,000+ influencers in about 70 markets, CEO and co-founder Barbara Soltysinska told me.A brand uses a desktop-based dashboard to select the kind of campaign it wants to run, and the platform shows that campaign to influencers who match the specs.Influencers view the campaign through the indaHash iOS or Android mobile app, and then submit campaign-related content to the brand for approval before posting to their followers. Or a brand can run a non-approval campaign, where selected influencers are free to post whatever related content.For indaHash, the idea of generating its own bitcoin-like Coins is an appealing way to pay influencers in those countries without having to deal with multiple banking systems.[Read the full article on Mar…

Twitter’s rolling out a way for advertisers to use video to get people to visit their websites.On Tuesday, the company unveiled the Video Website Card, a new ad format that pairs an autoplay video with a website link. The ad format is now available to all advertisers around the world through Twitter’s direct sales team and self-serve ad-buying tool for campaigns bought using one of three campaign objectives: video views, website clicks or awareness.The ad format is designed to offer advertisers a way to capture people’s attention and then immediately capitalize on that attention. For example, Jaguar has used the Video Website Card to showcase one of the auto brand’s new models in a 97-second commercial and link to a web page that delves into the car’s features. Below is a look at the organic version of that post.During the format’s testing phase, ads using the Video Website Card received a two times higher click-through rate than the average mobile video ad, according to Twitter.Twitt…

Google AdWords is a staple platform for the vast majority of digital marketing strategies. However, marketers need to get things right from the outset to avoid costly inefficiencies.This guide will provide everything you need to know to get an AdWords account up and running, and set for success. The digital marketing industry has grown in tandem with Google AdWords, to the extent that the two are linked inextricably.Of every dollar spent on digital advertising in the US 42 cents goes to Google, and the search giant brought in 96% of its revenues in 2016 from pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.It is easy to see why the format has such enduring appeal. Any business can get started and making money on AdWords in a few simple steps, with Google providing plentiful support along the way.The business model is beautifully crafted to fulfill a marketer’s needs; you only pay when a user takes out your desired action (normally a click, a call, or a purchase), so the return on investment is clear a…

When Google launched in 1998, the big knock against it was that it would be excruciatingly difficult to monetize the traffic because all search traffic would be sent off of Google. The theory was that the company needed to be like Yahoo or Lycos — to have a wide-ranging portal. But Google scoffed at the conventional wisdom and instead crafted its AdWords program in late 2000.By the following year, the company turned profitable and went on to radically change advertising. Seventeen years later, online search remains the dominant player in the online ad market, accounting for half of all digital advertising.Yet it certainly helps that the industry has continued to innovate and evolve. Consider that US mobile search accounts for almost 60 percent of overall search volume. There have also been great strides in voice-activated search. comScore predicts half of all searches to occur via voice by 2020.Given all of this, it is wise to consider that the online search market could be ripe for d…

As a business owner, you have to manage all aspects of your business – from customer satisfaction to payment to marketing campaigns. How do you keep track of it all while still making sure that your business is growing?Thankfully, it’s 2017, and there are literally thousands of apps and tools for any kind of business task imaginable.And if you’re a regular ShoutMeLoud reader, you know that we review a lot of tools…5 Great Tools For Small Business OwnersIn this roundup, we’re going to name five excellent tools designed for solo entrepreneurs and small business owners. We hope these tools help you achieve your business goals and make life easier for you and your team.1. Brand24Brand24 is a monitoring and analytics tool for small businesses who want to track their brand reach and reputation across popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.Its main function – Projects – tracks keywords about your brand, topic, or even the name of a competitor.The tool w…

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:Is GDPR the Y2K for B2B marketing? And how to use it to your advantage
Oct 16, 2017 by Scott Vaughan
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and Y2K share some surprising similarities. Columnist Scott Vaughan breaks them down and outlines four ways to prepare your organization for GDPR. Nanigans launches incrementality optimization & reporting solution
Oct 16, 2017 by Ginny Marvin
The new solution focuses on driving incremental revenue growth from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and programmatic retargeting campaigns. Instagram redesigns call-to-action bar to dynamically mirror ads
Oct 16, 2017 by Tim Peterson
By blending the bar with an ad’s photo or video, Instagram may be able to insert more ads in people’s feeds. What airlines can learn from smart marketers about the customer experience
Oct 16, 2017 by Evan Magliocca
The airline indust…

Buckle in. Marketing — and your entire organization — is about to be overwhelmed with stiffer data privacy regulations around the globe. The poster child for this movement is GDPR, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. As a marketing leader, you’ll be spending hundreds of hours with the legal eagles and the data teams on what many analysts are calling the biggest thing to hit B2B marketing in a generation.As we’ve been preparing for GDPR these last few months, I’m having flashbacks to my time in the IT world as we counted down to Y2K. The similarities between GDPR and Y2K are striking:Hype, hysteria and confusion that builds during countdown to enactment while people wonder about what’s really going to happen.Antiquated legacy tech and processes to figure out and deal with, which leads to discovering how messed up the systems and data are.A ton of money and resources spent — some valuable, most wasted — on trying to understand its impact and what to do.[Read the ful…