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When Microsoft announced strong annual financial results July 19, the growth of the company’s cloud services dominated the conversation. But I noticed something else in the company’s numbers: continued growth for Bing.  Although Bing accounts for a small share of Microsoft’s revenues, the search platform grew 17 percent year over year.TechRadar reported,“As more people used Bing, the search revenue (excluding traffic acquisition costs) also grew, so it looks like things are moving in the right direction.”Bing remains a distant second to Google in terms of market share, but the marketplace needs Bing to grow. A prosperous Bing gives businesses an alternative to Google and another viable platform to grow their visibility.Bing’s product improvements are good for brands and good for Google because healthy competition keeps everyone on their toes. Bing’s improvements also help business owners and search marketers in their optimization efforts. Let’s take a look at a number of Bing’s improv…

Over the last few years, a variety of vendors have offered account-based marketing (ABM) capabilities as standalones or as additions to their existing platforms.While ABM uses spears, the metaphor goes, traditional lead-based sales uses nets.In ABM, salespeople develop approaches, for instance, toward different IBM departments, focusing on their specific histories, needs and decision-making hierarchy. Each corporate account, as one observer noted, is treated “as its own market.”By contrast, traditional lead-based sales deals with individuals, and then sometimes makes connections between all the individuals who work at IBM.Marketo is an example of an existing platform that added some ABM capabilities when it bought Insightera in 2013, and then it boosted those functions in 2016. Other vendors, like Demandbase and Engagio, offer standalone solutions.This week, analytics and attribution platform CaliberMind is out with a solution to help marketers add ABM to their existing tools –– such …

Customer data platforms (CDPs), where all customer-related data is centralized, are a booming category. But, although CDPs can include offline data, they have been focused primarily on providing their repository for online campaigns and use cases.Now, Santa Monica-based Bridg has announced a CDP optimized for use by brick-and-mortar retailers, which it says is the first of its kind. The CDP, with an accompanying customer relationship management (CRM) system, is expected to be released this fall.Since 2012, founder and CEO Amit Jain told me, his company has been focused on providing a customer identification platform for physical stores.Previously, it created both deterministic and probabilistic profiles of customers, centered around their point-of-sale data.[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]The post Bridg announces ‘first CDP’ for brick-and-mortar retailers appeared first on Marketing Land.

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Marketing platform Swrve is out with version 3.0 of its platform, key new features of which are “payload” targeting and triggering.The company says other campaign tools only address the “outer shell” of an event, such as a search for a flight on a particular travel company’s app. But Swrve says it can now allow a marketer — for the first time — to target in real time the “payload” details inside each event, such as the data that indicates that the traveler searched for flights for business class for one flier from New York to London with checked bags.The Swrve platform is employed for a brand’s marketing to existing and logged-in customers, rather than for the acquisition of new ones, and the payload targeting/triggering is available for customers of apps that utilize the Swrve software development kit (SDK). The targeted segment can consist of identified or anonymized users, depending on the preferences of the app owner, or it could point to a single individual.By payload, Swrve mean…

Are people misrepresenting their virtual assistant behavior in surveys? Multiple consumer studies released over the past two years have found significant numbers of smart speaker owners are engaged in “voice commerce.” However, a new report, based apparently on internal Amazon data, argues that in fact, they’re not.The Information states that “… according to two people briefed on the [Amazon] internal figures,” only about 2 percent of Echo device owners have purchased anything directly through their smart speakers this year. However, in September 2017, 57 percent of smart speaker owners surveyed told NPR and Edison Research that they had ordered something using the device.An earlier 2017 survey from Walker Sands concluded that 19 percent of consumers had made a purchase using a virtual assistant in the past 12 months. There are other surveys with numbers in between.Source: NPR/Edison Research (2018)The 2018 update of the NPR research found that more than 70 percent of smart speaker ow…

Are you struggling to pick the best WordPress translation plugin to help you create a multilingual site?Well, it’s a difficult decision to make because it’s hard to switch plugins down the road, so you want to make sure that you get things right from day one.But do not worry…To help, I’ve collected six of the best WordPress translation plugins for you. For each plugin, I’ll list its key features and try to share the pros and cons of how it handles WordPress translations.I’ll start sharing the plugins in just a minute, but first, I think it’s important that you consider one question…Do You Want Manual Or Automatic Translation?With translation plugins, you have two main translation methods available to you:Manual translation: You’ll need to actually write each individual translation, or hire someone to do it for you. It’s more time-consuming and expensive, but it ensures that your translations are perfect.Automatic translation: Your site will be automatically translated by a computer. K…

If you change nothing, nothing will ever change.We’re making it our primary goal to improve advertising technology. We’re facing down the challenges of our industry and responding with innovation because we believe call-based leads are the truest form of performance marketing.Soleo matches ready-to-buy consumers with businesses by way of local searches and calls we redirect from out-of-service phone numbers to businesses. These businesses from 2,400 unique categories get quality, targeted leads, and consumers get the goods and services they’re looking for. And we do it millions of times a month.Call-based leads are growing by leaps and bounds, with a $1 trillion impact on consumer spending, according to a report by BIA/Kelsey. With this rapid industry growth, of course, are opportunities to grow and learn.We’re North America’s largest supplier of call-based leads. We see this time of growth as a call to action to elevate the quality of our industry. It’s part of a conversation we’re h…

The SEO kills creativity mantra isn’t uncommon among content writers. Likewise, SEO experts often voice complaints that creative writing should take a back seat to SEO perfection.The reality is that the best types of content marketing combine creativity with SEO value. Here’s a guide on the best ways to merge creativity and SEO for content marketing success.How SEO got a bad rap – and why it’s stuckContent marketing is still a new and shifting industry, and content creators who have been around for more than five years will remember its ugly early days. Many writers were first introduced to the world of SEO during the dreaded “content farm” years, when nothing mattered except how many keywords you could cram into a 300-word article.Fortunately, this practice has pretty much died (because Google’s algorithm makes it a very risky practice). But for writers who worked on these content farms, the scars are deep and ugly. Sadly, a lot of strong writers turned their back on the digital mark…

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 key characteristics that enable companies to cultivate customer advocates
Aug 7, 2018 by Matt Zilli
What makes a company compelling enough to win advocates? Contributor Matt Zilli lists the things a brand needs to inspire loyalty and passion.Don’t miss out on the best offer to attend SMX East
Aug 7, 2018 by Lauren Donovan
Struggling with how (and why) to optimize your site for speed, whether to focus on voice search, or how to measure cross-channel search campaigns? Attend SMX® East, October 24-25 in New York City to train with SEO and SEM experts at the top of their game and get the answers you need.TV-watching viewer app TV Time launches an analytics platform
Aug 7, 2018 by Barry Levine
The self-service platform offers sentiment analysis and user-generated content about specific programs, across broadcast, cable and OTT TV.Recent Headlines …

Most articles about driving customer advocacy focus on how to run successful advocacy initiatives or influencer marketing programs. This is not one of those articles. Those are important topics, for sure, and I’m saving my thoughts on them for a future post.What I want to do right now is make the point that customer advocacy is much bigger than programs and tactics, bigger even than strategies and initiatives. Advocacy, in fact, is a brand’s most basic success driver, because if you’re not giving customers compelling reasons to stand up and shout your praises, why are you even in business?Today, the will and the ability to create advocates must be part of the weave of any company. It can’t just be an overlay. It must come as a mandate from the top, and it needs to push up from the ranks to permeate every enterprise function, from product design and packaging to marketing, fulfillment and service.Jump-start customer advocacy by listeningI don’t have to tell you the monetary value of ad…