Social Media Training for Marketers

The single-most engaging, and simple, content marketing strategy is to create a reason and method for your audience members to supply content. Whether you ask them to submit photos using your product or you’re posting an engaging question of the week and aggregating answers for a roundup blog post, you’re building in the emotional trigger: they are the content. When someone sees their own photo, their name and contribution, they share like a proud parent. It’s like your own “easy button” for creating engaging content.

more strategic thought around how to deploy mobile in a shopping arena—not necessarily the new technologies or the new checkout system because that’s going to happen no matter what.”

s you start to see third parties map indoor spaces [and] you start to see retailers put beacons on the shelves, I think there is going to be some massively interesting creative unlocked [in 2015].” 

adoption of mobile payments and loyalty programs by both retailers and consumers. We’ve finally reached a long-awaited tipping point with beacons and NFC, and these technologies are poised to supercharge in-store sales and turn the tables on showrooming.” 

45% of B2C marketers have a dedicated content marketing group in their organization. 69% are creating more content now than they did one year ago. The use of blogs dropped from 72% last year to 67% this year; the biggest increase in tactic usage has been for branded content tools (from 37% to 47%). B2C marketers are using, on average, 7 social media platforms this year, compared with 6 last year. 71% of B2C marketers use print or other offline promotion, making it the paid method they use most frequently to promote/distribute content; yet only 46% of them say it’s effective. The method they find most effective is search engine marketing (57%).

Google is launching a new “Store Visits” metric in AdWords, designed to use your customers’ location to determine whether they’ve visited your stores, restaurants, and hotels after clicking on an ad.

“…most mobile research leads to a purchase, just not on the smartphone.”

“In a March 2014 survey conducted by Nielsen for xAd and Telmetrics, between 70% and 80% of US smartphone or tablet users said they had completed or would soon complete a purchase related to their smartphone search. The study also found that more than 40% of consumers considered a smartphone or tablet their most important media resource for a purchase decision.”

In today’s fast-paced, multichannel world, marketers no longer have the luxury to spend months crafting large projects; they must innovate and produce on the fly and respond immediately to market disruptions. In their new report, the researchers explain, “Agile for Marketing (A4M) drives long-term marketing strategies with short-term, customer-focused iterative projects that improve responsiveness and relevance. It allows for faster creative, more testing, smarter improvements and better results.”

63% of marketing leaders indicate agility as a high priority, but only 40% rate themselves as agile.

The CMOs we spoke with needed a solution that would help them orient marketing activities around the constant change in the marketplace—a solution that allows them to be more dynamic and flexible in their operations, more productive, and more collaborative and integrated in their work product.

“The days of the big bang campaign are gone. We don’t have time to spend months baking ideas and putting a big bang into market.” Article Highlights: The way we think about and execute marketing is in flux. Agile for Marketing (A4M) empowers organizations to be more responsive to the market.Now is the time to create a new competitive advantage through innovation and responsiveness.

CMOs adopting A4M have an unprecedented ability to tackle corporate and market realities with ease, speed, and intelligence. And our research shows that translates into stronger business performance and higher employee satisfaction.

agile firms grow revenue 37 percent faster and generate 30 percent higher profits than nonagile organizations.

Nielsen competitor ComScore is trying hard to create a product that will loosen Nielsen's grip on TV ratings, but that's a nearly impossible task. The question is less whether Nielsen's TV ratings will go away than whether traditional linear cable agreements will eventually go away and Nielsen's ratings system will become obsolete

There's just too much that's too similar on TV, and the wars of attrition with cable operators mean all packages just aren't going to contain all channels anymore. They can't afford to.

Third parties like Acxiom and Experian have an incredible amount of information, and the CEO of Acxiom told us consumers should have to pay to prevent their financial data from circulating among anybody who wants to buy it, basically like getting an upgrade on an airline.