I’ve been reading predictions with some amusement about how AI virtual assistants will make our lives easier and better by thinking for us. The prognosticators of AI technology remind me of the early days of social media and its love fest promise of brands building relationships and interacting with their customers. Well, we all know where that got us. Which brings me to AI platforms and big tech.
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Do you have the resources to achieve your business goals?
Altimeter Research recently released a new research report entitled Key Elements of a Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy. In the report, they correctly identify that marketing is no longer considered a stepchild on the organizational chart but rather a leader in innovation and digital transformation.
Today, achievement of many business goals requires an integrated digital strategy that encompasses traditional awareness goals as well as the ability to reach customers on an on-demand personal level thought to be unachievable just a few years ago.
Below are my thoughts for business-to-business marketers as they start to navigate the technology and resources needed to achieve their business goals.
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Well, here we are at another crossroad for social media platforms. Masters of the universe in Silicon Valley are being taken to task for their lack of control and protection of user information and accountability for the content posted to their platforms. Both of these topics are specifically related to trust. Over the past few months, there has been a decline in user participation due to deliberate manipulation of content designed to divide or inflame, user privacy issues, fake news, and a general denial that the above-mentioned are growing problems for these platforms.
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There are branding benefits that can be derived and measured for brands that choose to participate in social media. However, practicing a “set and forget” social media strategy can have negative branding repercussions.
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Go ahead, I DARE you – avoid logging onto Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or whatever your social media platform of choice is for six weeks. This is one way to gain perspective on what a total time suck, and how manipulative these global monsters have become. This is not a rant about Facebook and their apparent disregard for protecting their users private information, there’s enough of that going around already, but rather a reflection on distancing myself a seemingly innocuous part of my daily routine.
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Today we live in a two-hour news cycle environment. It’s exhausting, not only for those charged with gathering and reporting the news, but more for us that consume the news. Overload is inevitable, leading to accepting the unacceptable as normal behavior.
Bombarded by the likes of FOX, MSNBC, and the social media channels — Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube — we can find little respite to gather our thoughts and make informed decisions as to what is credible content and the effect it has on us.
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Running successful long-term AdWords campaigns can be a balancing act between key word selection and budget allocation. Google AdWords experiments provide an avenue to test new ads and keywords against existing ads at the same time. However, there can be a downside to running an experiment in the form of a drop-off in click-through rates (CTR) and conversions while the experiment is running.
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For the better part of my advertising career I worked with commodity and specialty brands. This was especially true in the chemical industry. Consumer brands such as M&M’s or Revlon would prefer that their customers not know too much about what really goes into the making of their favorite snack, nail polish color, or fragrance. We referred to these brands as the name behind the name you know.
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Well, it’s finally happened – social media networks are being forced to come clean about how and where they make their vast fortunes. To most of us, these networks started as benign play things where we could post pictures and inflate our digital persona to make us look cooler than we actually were. As with most technology platforms, investors became involved and what started as a noble endeavor to make the world a better place was replaced with “how can this be scaled and monetized?”
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Understanding marketing’s contribution to revenue generation has two sides. Traditional brand value and awareness measurement require research, focus groups, and surveys to understand the customer’s emotional connection with the brand and their acceptance or rejection of the brand’s promise.
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Life After Advertising 