Group items tagged

Talk Time is a sales concept backed by research that values conversation with clients and prospects. Regardless how good a sales or account person is at “selling,” every minute they’re talking to a client or prospect is worth $25 per minute in future revenue. Whether you’re a bartender selling a drink or a Boeing VP selling a 737, the time you spend developing a relationship is valued at $25 a minute towards future revenue.

Agency owners should take note that obsession with the billable hour without creating connection is akin to stepping over dollars to pick up pennies.

37% of Facebook store operators were using the site as their sole sales channel.

No matter the size of the business, consumers still express hesitation when it comes to making purchases on social networks. According to JWT Intelligence, privacy was shoppers’ main concern when asked about F-commerce in June 2011. Similar percentages of consumers questioned whether Facebook was secure enough to be a safe purchase platform.

small businesses find the channel appealing because it lets them “leverage their scrappiness,”

what are some of the things you can A/B test with your influencer marketing campaigns? All the same things you test in your other channels…

xperiment with different types of content and track which resonates best with their audience for your goal. For example, images may drive better social engagement, while videos are better for leads and signups. Alternately, you may find certain content performs better on some channels over others.

Don’t forget all the types of content you have at your disposal – podcasts, live stream videos, tweets, Instagram Stories, webinars, long-form blog posts, short-form blog posts, and much, much more.

Snapchat is at the mercy of competitors like Facebook and Google that can simply copy its products.Advertisers say Snapchat's unique selling point is that it is cool, new, and has created its own advertising "currency."But ad-buyers also need Snapchat to do more to prove its ads actually drive sales if they are going to commit meaningful budgets to the platform.

the barrier to entry for new entrants is low, and the switching costs to another platform are also low. Moreover, the majority of our users are 18-34 years old.

Users under 25, it says, visit Snapchat more than 20 times and spend more than 30 minutes on the app each day. It may have fewer users than its rivals, but, for now at least, they are highly-engaged

Last April, Gamestop Corp. (GME) opened a store on Facebook to generate sales among the 3.5 million-plus customers who’d declared themselves “fans” of the video game retailer. Six months later, the store was quietly shuttered. Gamestop has company. Over the past year, Gap Inc., J.C. Penney (JCP) Co. and Nordstrom (JWN) Inc. have all opened and closed storefronts on Facebook Inc.’s (FB) social networking site.

“We just didn’t get the return on investment we needed from the Facebook market, so we shut it down pretty quickly,” Sheetz said in a telephone interview. “For us, it’s been a way we communicate with customers on deals, not a place to sell.”

“It was basically just another place to shop for all the stuff already available on the retailer websites,” Gerten said. “I give so-called F-commerce an ‘F.’”

Again, it starts with a customer list that a business has already created — for example if I’ve given my email address to the bookstore on my block so that I can hear about future sales and events. Businesses will be able to upload those lists of email addresses, phone numbers, and user IDs to Facebook, though the data will be hashed first so that Facebook doesn’t have access to that information. Meanwhile, Facebook’s user data will be similarly hashed, so the company can compare both sets of hashed data, creating a list of users whose contact information matches up with what the advertiser uploaded.

from the user’s perspective, one of the best parts about Actions is that you can use them without incessantly oversharing to your friends.

When you share a post or update your status on Facebook, it will appear in your friends’ news feeds. But when you have an Action coming from the Open Graph (i.e., from a site that exists outside Facebook but that uses Facebook Connect in some way), that activity will only appear in the Ticker and on your own Timeline.

Many Actions partners will offer granular settings to give you control over what you share. For example, design-centric flash-sale site Fab.com’s “Bought” actions are opt-in. Like the Actions turned on but don’t want to share a particular purchase with your friends? Mark it as a gift to hide it. Don’t worry about embarrassing buys; all Fab.com “adult” items are hidden by default.

acebook has known for a while that the things its users talk about are supremely interesting and relevant for advertisers. Twitter proved that basing an advertising model around brand mentions really works; Facebook is bound to follow suit. Already, we are seeing Facebook taking steps into Twitter’s territory by showcasing which topics and brands are trending in users’ News Feeds, and by aggregating hashtagged terms

Offline conversion for retailers. Speaking of consumers’ path-to-purchase on Facebook, the ability for retailers to track offline sales conversions from ads viewed on Facebook is another critical step Facebook is taking to give advertisers deeper insight into how their ads actually drive some type of consumer action.

Shazam execs' talk of using their proprietary data for advertising puts them in league with The Weather Company, Pandora and Amazon, which are all mining information like pollen count, song choices and product purchases to inform ad targeting. Mr. McGurn said the Shazam app ingests the live audio feed from 160 TV networks every day. That positions the app as an ally to TV networks trying to stem their share of ad spend from being siphoned online.

Shazam is also currying favor with TV networks as a way to drive viewership. For last fall's Country Music Association Awards, Shazam pushed alerts featuring the show's air date and time to the in-app news feeds of eight million users who might be interested in watching, like those who had previously tagged a Blake Shelton song. Ten million people received such a notification for The Grammys.

People who use Shazam to "tag" the game's broadcast this year will be shown a new Twitter-like timeline. The live content feed will document the game -- from tweets to photos to ads -- and is designed to keep people using Shazam for the duration. But even if people tune in and out of the app, Shazam has created a new ad-retargeting program that plugs into Facebook.

Percolate first identifies which social topics matter to brands’ audiences, then finds matching assets in those brands’ databases. SocialFlow tracks how many of a brand’s social followers are active throughout the day, then automatically posts the brand’s content at the best possible moment. Brand Networks taps historical sales and weather databases to tell retailers which products will generate the most social interest, based on local forecasts. SimpleFeed helps brands’ affiliates automate content selection — dynamically publishing social posts that have worked for other affiliates in the past.

while lots of marketers spend lots of money on Facebook today, relatively few find success. In August, Forrester surveyed 395 marketers and eBusiness executives at large companies across the US, Canada and the UK — and these executives told us that Facebook creates less business value than any other digital marketing opportunity.

ompany focuses too little on the thing marketers want most: driving genuine engagement between companies and their customers. Your sales materials tease marketers with the promise that you’ll help them create such connections. But in reality, you rarely do. Everyone who clicks the like button on a brand’s Facebook page volunteers to receive that brand’s messages — but on average, you only show each brand’s posts to 16% of its fans.

company isn’t good enough at the pure advertising business onto which you’ve shifted your focus. We estimate your site now delivers tens of billions of display ads every day. But fewer than 15% of those ads leverage your ever-growing cache of social data to target relevant audiences. And your site’s static-image ad units offer marketers less impact per impression than they could achieve with the ad units other sites offer.

Target is leveraging Pinterest with a new microsite that merchandises products with the combination of top-pinned items and best reviews on Target.com.

The products are set up vertically to mimic the same experience of a mobile news feed on a social media site. Clicking on a product shows consumers the number of reviews the product has received on Target.com and its average rating out of five stars.

About 1 in 5 respondents said they have used Twitter in conjunction with a TV campaign. Promoted Tweets are the most popular of Twitter’s ad formats among respondents, used by about twice as many as promoted accounts, and by roughly three times as many as have used Twitter Amplify. Respondents’ primary goal for Twitter advertising is to build awareness and sentiment for their brand, with significantly fewer claiming as their main goal driving traffic to their websites, building followers, generating sales leads, selling products and staying in touch with customers.

58.6% share of respondents said that their Twitter budgets represent new spending. Those reallocating from other media are most commonly turning to offline (17.6%), online display (16.6%), email (12.3%), search (10.8%) and TV (9.9%) for funds. (Similar data concerning the constitution of online video and social media budgets can be found here and here.)

7 in 10 respondents – execs at marketers, agencies and media companies – use Twitter as a marketing channel, only a minority (46.5%) of those are spending on advertising on the platform. By comparison, a previous survey from Ad Age (covered here) found that of the 83% using Facebook, almost three-quarters were buying ads.

From every ad, users can also steer themselves to an "ads preferences" settings page, where they can tell Facebook not to show them ads based on their inferred affinity for certain categories. Conversely, they can also select categories they are interested in.

Now users who click or tap on the drop-down menu on a Facebook ad and select "Why am I seeing this ad?" will be taken to a brief explanation for why that ad was shown to them. For instance, a user could be told they saw an ad because they're interested in televisions, and that Facebook's inference was based on pages they've liked and ads they've clicked on.

the new targeting is intended to help direct-response advertisers, in particular, to make their Facebook ads more relevant to their selected audience.