REPOST: 3 Ways to Advance Digital Marketing in Your Organization

Embracing digital marketing can be a difficult project to undertake for many traditional companies. ClickZ.com offers the following tips to help companies make digital marketing a more integral part of their organization:

Image Source: clickz.com

These three tips can help you bring your company to the forefront of the digital marketing scene - are you ready?

Digital marketing, with its constant changes and new technologies emerging regularly, is oftentimes a huge initiative to implement for many companies. While some organizations hopped on board early, making the necessary investments in people, technology, and creative thinkers needed to make digital marketing a central part of their go-to-market strategy, others lag behind their industry peers. If you fall into the latter category – or even if you’re just trying to make digital marketing a more integral part of your organization – check out my three tips to help your initiatives gain momentum within your company below:

1. Brief Executives on What Is Possible.

Executives can be your biggest source of momentum for digital marketing. However, before they give you their full endorsement – along with budget and headcount – they have to fully understand the benefits that digital marketing will bring your company.

To ensure you receive their commitment, consider sharing case studies provided by your software vendors or those found in online content searches. Try to include competitive examples of how your industry peers and competitors are deploying digital marketing technology. Also, be sure to include statistics and findings from reports like the IBM Global CMO Study, which will give your executives digestible insight into what their counterparts are doing and thinking. You’ll also need to be prepared to share specific digital marketing programs that you think will help drive revenue and increase customer loyalty. If you’re successful, you might just find a strong ally in the C-suite for what you need to do!

 

2. Educate Teams Outside of the Marketing Department.

Folks outside of your organization are most likely interested in how your marketing initiatives are affecting the company’s bottom line. To provide some insight for them, consider scheduling things like lunch and learns to educate both your peers and leaders of other departments. You might even be able to get them on board enough that they end up contributing content! Or, at the least, they will be more aware of how their schedules can impact what you’re trying to achieve with your digital marketing efforts and be more sympathetic to your needs and accelerated schedule. They may even be able to come up with some interesting ideas for how you can "program-ize" an initiative.

 

3. Rally Around a New Program.

One of the greatest benefits of marketing automation technology is that it gives you the ability to do rule-based communications, allowing you to break out of the manual methods used to segment, query, prepare, and execute traditional email campaigns. While automated programs greatly increase your efficiency and effectiveness, they do not necessarily raise the profile of the transformation that you are undertaking within your marketing team.

However, one of the biggest benefits of a distinct program is that it typically allows you to easily measure program investment and ROI. These programs typically direct customers or prospects to a particular area of your website or a landing page where you gain more information about their specific needs. You’ll then follow up with helpful automated content either in the form of a report or series of helpful content spaced out over days or weeks.

These tips are just a few of the ways you can advance digital marketing in your company to provide the awesome experience your customers deserve. However, there is always more to learn, both from industry experts and your marketing peers.

Mitch Berman is the founder of ZillionTV Corporation and the CEO of Zen Digital Fund. More discussions on digital marketing can be found here.

REPOST: Search “Super Bowl” & See The Best Search Results Page Bing Has Ever Had

Fans can get their regular fix of Super Bowl action through Bing’s search results page specially designed and re-engineered for their viewing pleasure. Read the article below to learn what makes it standout from other search engines tackling the same query.  

Image Source: searchengineland.com

That’s what it looks like if you do a search for “super bowl” on Bing. (You can click the image to see a bigger version if it helps. I’ll be commenting on the numbered items above throughout the article below.)

I know, as a longtime SEO consultant, that I’m supposed to hate all of the content on the page and how far down the “10 blue links” have been pushed and how much traffic sports-related websites are probably losing because there’s so much content and so little need to click to another page … but I think this is the single greatest page of search results I’ve ever seen on Bing. Here’s why:

Left-Side Content

The top of the main search results content block starts with basic game info (#1 on the image above) that, by now, we’d all expect on any search engine. Indeed, Google and Yahoo have very similar boxes.

Bing’s answer box goes way beyond Google and Yahoo, though. It’s got a game prediction from the often correct Bing predictions tool that adds some color to the game matchup. (#2 above) Oh, and there’s an affiliate link for “Tickets” that leads to SeatGeek.com. I can do without that, but whatever.

Then there’s data from Stats LLC showing some of the key players (#3 above) in Sunday’s game, including projections on two “game changers” — Rob Gronkowski and Marshawn Lynch — and season leaders from both the Patriots and Seahawks.

Image Source: searchengineland.com

It’s fantastic.

Below that, the left side of the page finally gets into the news links (#4 above), website links and more — including a block of videos for Super Bowl commercials, even though I didn’t specifically search for commercials. Smart move, in my opinion, because those commercials are one of the main reasons a lot of people watch the game in the first place.

Right-Side Content

Bing’s search results page gets even more interesting over on the right side of the page.

It starts with a big block of data (#5 above) from the Bing Snapshot product. In this case, Bing’s telling us how to watch the game — including a link to NBC’s free, online stream. (Google Trends tells us that searches for “super bowl live stream” are way up at the moment.) Bing even tells us who’s singing the national anthem and at halftime. Great touches.

A little farther down the Snapshot content is a series of four factoids about each team (#6 above). It’s got a quote from each team, an “X factor” player, a “Question mark” and a “How they’ll beat” the other team statement.

Image Source: searchengineland.com

Here’s what’s interesting about this: Someone at Bing has written this content specifically for the search results page. I’ve asked Bing to tell more about this, but they haven’t answered yet. But I know this: Do searches for the exact phrases in this section — like “Will All-Pro TE Rob Gronkowski get open against Seattle’s Legion of Boom secondary?” — and you won’t find them anywhere else on the web in that exact wording. Bing credits the Snapshot data to Wikipedia and ESPN, but neither have the exact phrase “Will WRs Doug Baldwin and Jermaine Kearse be able to get open downfield against New England’s formidable CBs?” That’s original text on Bing’s part.

After that, the right side has things like related searches, related images, a couple ads and it ends with a recent Super Bowl-related tweet (#7 above).

What About Google?

Google’s search results page for the same query this morning is nothing like Bing’s. It’s kind of shocking that such a popular cultural event only gets a basic Onebox treatment on Google, followed by the standard news and website links.

Google isn’t even showing video or image results for this query.

Final Thoughts

As someone who publishes a couple websites, I’m normally not a fan of seeing search engines put so much content above search results like this — especially at the expense of online publishers providing that content. My U2 website is no doubt starting to lose traffic now that both Google and Bing are showing song lyrics right in the search results. Ugh.

So I understand why many of our readers won’t like the kind of search results page that Bing is presenting here for “super bowl,” but I like it. I think this is an amazing search results page. The best I’ve ever seen on Bing.

Zen Digital Fund’s Mitch Berman is a respected digital marketing strategist who is a great inspiration for anyone interested in carving his own niche in technology and media. Follow this Twitter account for more cutting-edge perspectives on the current issues and trends on media, technology, and digital marketing.

REPOST: Big brand advertisers want to find their logos in your pictures

A picture says a thousand words, even for businesses. TIME reports that digital marketing companies have started analyzing photos posted on Instagram and other photo-sharing sites to examine customer insights and market trends. Read the details below.

Image Source: playbookpublicrelations.com

That picture you posted on Instagram from the beach last week might have more useful data in it than you think.

Where are you? What do you have in your hand? Do you look happy or sad? What are you wearing? These are all questions that can help advertisers target their marketing to consumers, so a crop of new digital marketing companies has begun analyzing photos posted on Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest and other photo-sharing sites to look for these trends and insights.

Image Source: digitalmi.com

Ditto Labs Inc. uses photo-scanning software to locate logos in these personal photos (is the subject wearing a North Face jacket? Or holding a can of Coca-Cola?) and look at the context in which these brands are being used.

For example, according to the Wall Street Journal, Kraft Food Groups Inc. pays Ditto Labs to find their logos on Instagram and Tumblr. Ditto Labs then analyzes trends like what people drink when they’re eating Kraft products and how happy they appear to be. They are then placed into categories like “foodie” and “sports fan” based on how they’re eating their Kraft food.

Image Source: kingselitemedia.com

Digital marketing firms use personal photos in other ways, too; Piquora Inc. stores massive amounts of these images over a few months to look at trends over time.

This new brand of marketing research serves as a fresh reminder that the photos we put online are public, and once we click ‘post’ we lose control over who sees them and what they’re used for. “This is an area that could be ripe for commercial exploitation and predatory marketing,” Joni Lupovitz, vice president at children’s privacy advocacy group Common Sense Media, told the Journal. “Just because you happen to be in a certain place or captured an image, you might not understand that could be used to build a profile of you online.”  

Mitch Berman is the founder of Zillion TV Corp. and the CEO of Zen Digital Fund. Subscribe to this blog for the latest business and marketing trends.

REPOST: Challenge for digital marketers to keep up with innovation

In this article for The Belfast Telegraph, Norbert Sagnard shares the lessons he learned about digital marketing from the Mobile World Congress, one of the world's biggest events in the mobile industry.

 

At the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I was reminded how digital innovation is impacting the practice of mobile marketing. What to do with 'cameras without lenses', or with 'proximity sensing' that allows you to move content on a smartphone screen without actually touching the screen, or with paying your retail purchases from a nod of your head?

Such new techniques always seem outlandish at first, yet they become the new normal for billions of smartphone users around the world rapidly.

Image Source: limexdesign.co.za

Technology breakthroughs are coming thick and fast, thanks to crowd-funding and angel investment, and accelerators like Wayra, where founders set up and grow their tech business and launch new products within a few months. The challenge for marketers is to stay up-to-date on new digital technologies, to engage and communicate with the billions of smartphone users – the general population in developed economies – who watch more video every day and adopt new ways of communicating through apps like Snapchat, Whatsapp and Telegram, ever faster.

The complexity and plethora of mobile technologies like augmented reality, frictionless payments, wearables, NFC, smartX – watches, fitness trackers, houses, cars – forces creative professionals to adapt brand stories leveraging the technical capabilities of the moment. This begs the question, can marketing innovation only be subordinate to digital innovation?

Image Source: theguardian.com

Over the past decade, marketing has evolved into digital due to web innovation and is now exploding into a myriad of combinations in the mobile space, where both real and virtual worlds blend. Sci-fi movies seem to precede our reality with ever less delays, tricks from Star Trek and Minority Report are here today, but the fundamental question for marketers is which communication tools and style to use, in order to address the fickle mood of their audience, or to devise mobile commerce journeys that make shopping effortless and enjoyable from a mobile device.

The quickening pace of technology innovation sets us all, marketers, the challenge of dedicating ourselves to continuous learning, trialling, refining, adopting or discarding in weeks rather than months, new mobile technologies. We must make decisions fast, yet achieve the objective of raising brand differentiation, brand value and customer satisfaction, those timeless marketing values.

Follow this Mitch Berman Twitter account for more on the latest trends in digital marketing.

REPOST: Casting Jesus is a key marketing decision

Casting Jesus for the big screen has always been a challenging feat. Fox News reveals what goes on in casting Portuguese actor Diogo Morgado as Jesus for the new film “Son of God.” 

Image Source: foxnews.com

They say you can never be too rich or too thin. Surely it goes without saying that you can't be too good-looking, either, right? Especially in Hollywood.

But in the popular new film "Son of God," Jesus is so, well, easy on the eyes that some are revisiting an age-old question that has vexed scholars for centuries:

Did Jesus really look like Brad Pitt, only slightly better?

OK, that exact question hasn't vexed scholars for centuries. But those who study religion as portrayed in popular culture do note that depicting Jesus on the screen has always been a tricky business, one that balances weighty theological concerns — how divine to make the son of God, and how human? — with more earthly ones, like how best to sell movie tickets?

"Listen, films are big business," says Steven Kraftchick, professor at Emory University's Candler School of Theology. "They're probably not going to cast Jonah Hill as Jesus."

Not that Hill wouldn't provide an interesting spin. But the producers of "Son of God," Roma Downey (who also plays Jesus' mother Mary) and her husband Mark Burnett, were clearly going for something different when they chose the strapping, 6-foot 3-inch Diogo Morgado, a Portuguese actor who's dabbled in modeling, for "The Bible," their History channel miniseries. ("Son of God" is culled from footage shot for the series).

Downey won't deny her Jesus is good-looking — not that she'd get very far with that — but explains she was seeking a subtle mix of qualities. "Someone with strength, presence, charisma, tenderness, kindness, compassion and natural humility," she says. "Someone who could be both a lion AND a lamb."

Casting came down to the wire. A few weeks before shooting was to begin in Morocco, there was still no Jesus. Downey fired off an email to church and business contacts with the urgent header: "Looking for Jesus."

Salvation came from an unexpected place. In Ouarzazate, Morocco, a member of an advance team remembered an actor who'd been there more than a year earlier on a different project. He searched through hotel registries and found the name.

Not surprisingly, Morgado's looks have been a big part of the conversation ever since. "We not only found Jesus, we found 'Hot Jesus,'" Oprah Winfrey told him in a TV interview, referring to a Twitter hashtag about the actor. "

A hunkier Jesus than necessary," Variety noted in its review of the movie. The Hollywood Reporter called it "Jesus as pretty boy," and noted a resemblance between Morgado and the young Marlon Brando.

But box office is booming. "Son of God" came in a close second last weekend to Liam Neeson's "Non-Stop," beating out the blockbuster "Lego" movie.

To Morgado, it's all good. "Long after I'm gone, this is going to be my legacy," he said in a telephone interview. "So why should I worry about people calling me 'Hot Jesus'? I'm really proud of this movie."

His key acting challenge, Morgado notes, was getting that balance between divine and human: "It's a really tricky thing."

That's always been a problem, says Jeffrey Mahan, professor at the Iliff school of theology in Denver. "Jesus films go back to the very beginning of cinema, and there's always that tension between human and divine."

Mahan notes that "this isn't the first sexy Jesus on film." When Jeffrey Hunter played the role in the 1961 "King of Kings," he says, people dismissively dubbed it "I Was a Teenage Jesus," a reference to Hunter's youthful good looks (though he was in his 30s).

Some films, like the 1959 "Ben-Hur," avoided problems by not showing Jesus' face. Others, says Adele Reinhartz, author of "Jesus in Hollywood" and professor at the University of Ottawa, show a sanitized figure "that could have walked right out of a Renaissance painting." But they were always fairly good-looking: "These are marketing decisions."

The deeper problem with portraying Jesus, Reinhartz says, is that "to make a compelling movie character, you need flaws. And that doesn't fit into most conceptions of Jesus."

One exception was Martin Scorsese's 1988 "The Last Temptation of Christ," starring Willem Dafoe as a Jesus conflicted about his identity and experiencing earthly temptations, like lust. That didn't please everyone — a Christian fundamentalist group hurled Molotov cocktails at a Paris theater where it played.

Then there was Mel Gibson's 2004 "The Passion of the Christ," starring Jim Caviezel, an enormous hit which is deemed one of the most controversial films of all time, both because of its bloody depiction of the Crucifixion — Roger Ebert called it the most violent film he'd ever seen — and allegations of anti-Semitism.

Caviezel, Dafoe, Morgado — all give different interpretations, but they all look a certain way. None, for example, are dark-skinned, as some have speculated Jesus was. Others have noted that men of the time were significantly smaller than they are today.

"The fact is we just don't know how Jesus looked," says Kraftchick, at Emory. "How big was he? Did he have a speech defect?"

Downey, asked about the issue, points out that her Jesus is a Latino, and that in itself is groundbreaking. (The film is also being released in Spanish.)

What troubles Mahan is that heartthrob Jesus portrayals ignore that "Jesus was an outsider. And this 'pretty Jesus' is an attempt to make him sort of a celebrity. That isn't accurate according to the tone of the Gospels. "

Morgado says he's taking the long view.

"When I was in Jerusalem, I saw a man and a 10-year-old kid praying," he says. "And I looked at the kid and thought, 'Wow, I will be his visual and spiritual reference."

That's what producers are hoping.

"I think people who don't know Jesus will fall in love," Downey says. "And those who do know him will fall in love all over again."

Zen Digital Fund CEO Mitch Berman aims to harness creative talents and innovative digital entrepreneurs to help forge a new era in digital marketing. Follow this Twitter page for more news on marketing, media, and technology.

REPOST: Enterprise software marketing: Sell the value, not the box

If you’re planning to put your software in the market, focusing on customer needs instead of your product features will give you a better boost in sales. Learn more about this technique in this article from ZDNet.com.

Many enterprise software startups view success as a simple equation: build a great product and the world will line up to buy. There are two problems with this logic. First, it assumes that great product always drives great success; and second, this thinking leads to feature-oriented, rather than customer-centric, decisions.

The tendency to focus on features rather than customer needs is understandable. After all, the team pours its life into refining the idea, building features, designing the UX, testing, and all the other incredibly demanding tasks associated with launching a product.

The drive to perfect features before achieving a profound understanding of customer needs, pains, and business context comes from the mistaken assumption that technology, like idealized love, can overcome any obstacle. This mindset pushes many startups to believe their core mission is creating a great product.

In a blog post and video, entrepreneur and Stanford professor, Steve Blank, challenges startups to rethink the fundamental nature of their challenge and goal. Instead of pushing for better product and technology alone, Blank defines a startup as:




Blank's perspective has three important implications for enterprise marketing and sales. Although tailored to startups, these points are equally valid for people in large or established software companies, who may forget their real job is satisfying customer needs and creating delightful outcomes for buyers:

1. Customers are king. There is no substitute for spending time with real customers in your target market. Although the old adage, "the customer is always right" is often wrong, never forget that your company has little value outside the benefit it provides to customers. When it comes to selling, theories about the world are meaningless unless real customers actually buy.
2. Markets don't buy, people do. The term "market" is an abstraction designed to generalize about groups of prospects or customers. In the zeal to identify target markets we may forget that individuals, not markets, issue purchase orders. Strategize for the market but sell to the person. 
3. Sell value, not features. In enterprise software sales, feature wars push combatants toward commoditization — as software vendors leapfrog each other's feature lists, buyers learn to pay lowest dollar using missing features as the lever. Instead, build value by selling the meaning, not the box.

The best enterprise startups internalize the customer's mind so thoroughly that the resulting product actually anticipates customer needs. Products that meet this high standard are virtually always grounded in a deep and profound understanding of the customer; it rarely happens by chance.
In my experience, startups who don't get this message drift from one solution to another, never getting the traction they need. And large companies who focus on features, rather than real value, end up looking like their competitors in an endless cycle of non-innovation.

Mitch Berman, the founder of ZillionTV Corporation, has over 30 years of experience in domestic and international consumer and enterprise marketing, operations, and sales. Visit this Facebook page for more information about his career.

REPOST: Tradigital Marketing: How to integrate traditional and digital marketing for maximum results

In this article from The Business Journals, John Garcia discusses tradigital marketing--the integration of traditional and digital marketing strategies--as the most effective way to reach target audience, score high conversion rates, and make the most sales.

Image provided by ThinkStock (Oleksiy Mark) Image Source: bizjournals.com

There is a paradigm shift regarding the way people consume media.

Media that includes newspapers, television, magazines, radio, direct mail and the Internet are now the conversation starters, and digital is the new destination. People want to know where to go online to either get the rest of the information, sign-up for, or download the offer.

In other words, it is not "traditional" vs. "digital," its "tra-digital" that will garner the best results.

For starters, there are far too many "digital" ad agencies that want to tell you that traditional media is dead — that no one reads the paper or listens to radio anymore. They want to take your ad dollars and put all of them in search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), and a brand new website.

While it may seem like good advice, this is not a good strategy. The truth is traditional media is not dead, but its role has changed dramatically.

For one thing, a digital agency only knows digital and therefore only recommends digital solutions. Even so-called “full-service agencies” are often guilty of separating traditional and digital marketing strategies, doing a disservice to their clients.

A quick case in point is Ironhorse Country Club. The club came to our agency after years of advertising a discounted-fees ad in the local newspaper (“bring in the coupon or call to schedule a round”). The club’s goal was to add a minimum of 25 new members in Q4 2012. We reallocated its budget, and for the same amount of money that they were spending in print, we created two 15-second commercials and ran them locally during two televised golf tournaments, The Fed-Ex Cup and The Ryder Cup.

The results were 92 new memberships — A 300 percent increase. All we did was use a media vehicle that best reached the club’s target audience with a simple call to action: “Visit Ironhorse Membership dot com to schedule a free membership preview round."

This TV campaign generated more traffic to the landing page than any SEO, SEM or other digital campaign could ever have in such a short period of time. The landing page made it easy for the prospect to continue down the sales funnel, and the excellent service by the advertiser closed the deal.

The takeaway: A tradigital strategy that is highly targeted, using a well-crafted ad, and directing its audience online will deliver the highest conversion rate because it mirrors the mindset of the advertiser’s audience.

Next month we’ll discuss the five basic steps to a successful tradigital marketing campaign.


Mitch Berman is a pioneer in the creation of innovative digital consumer and business-to-business products and services based on the principles of influence, sharing, and reward.  Follow this Twitter page to keep abreast of the latest marketing updates.