Marketing Predictions for 2013

In 2012, there were increased developments for marketers. Social media sites, such as Facebook, created a massive mobile advertising business. Now the question is, what does 2013 have to offer? Advertising experts got together to show marketing predictions for the year to come.

The first strategy experts explored was “Mobile-First Strategy.” Facebook and Google are two sites responsible for the mobile ad spending tripling to $4 billion in 2012. According to eMarketer, “we expect mobile ads to increasingly become the top priority for advertisers on digital, rather than desktop.” This is the result of consumers spending more time and money on mobile devices.

Next experts explored the revision of “Banner Ads.” Banner ads do not work well on mobile devices, which has lead companies to reconsider using them. However, the ads will not be going away for good, instead businesses are working on a more creative way to post them and become user friendly.

Study: iPad Accounts for Almost 95 % of Tablet Web Traffic

 

Aiming to get a sense for how powerful the tablet is, online advertising network Chitika looked at what devices it was serving ads to and found that it was almost exclusively Apple tablets.

For every 100 iPad impressions, Chitika is serving slightly more than one ad to a Samsung Galaxy and Asus Transformer Prime and under one ad to the Motorola Xoom, BlackBerry PlayBook and Kindle Fire. The Nook Tablet share is even lower, though clearly both the Nook and Kindle are marketed less as Web browsing devices and more as media consumption tools.

In total, the iPad accounted for more than 94 percent of ads, Chitika said.

It shows that not only are iPads outselling their rivals, but each one that is sold is also more heavily used, at least when it comes to Web surfing.

“Going forward the competition is going to be hard pressed to find a way to overthrow the seemingly omnipotent Apple,” Chitika said. “Not only do they offer a great product, they have the undying devotion of their enthusiasts.”

Creating a Well-Rounded Marketing Media Strategy

If you find yourself questioning the value of traditional media in your marketing strategy because:

• Digital investment is generating lots of clicks to your website,
• Your competition recently launched a web or mobile campaign,
• And your inbox is flooded with promises from digital media vendors to deliver engaged consumers, premium content and targeting technologies at an unbelievably low cost?

The digital age has had an unquestionable positive impact on the ability of advertisers to zero in on consumers fitting their ideal demographic, geographic and psychographic profiles, with the proficiency of a star athelete like Lebron James or Eli Manning to hit their respective targets. But, just as you can’t put Eli Manning on the basketball court or put Lebron James on a football field and get the same results, you can’t expect digital media alone to accomplish all of the media goals and objectives in your marketing media strategy.

The purchase cycle
Big ticket purchases like cars, furniture, jewelry, and medical services are some of the most important retail investments affecting individuals—and the consumer doesn’t want to make a mistake.

Digital marketing is great at attracting audiences concerned with making the best decisions—people who are proactive about their purchasing decisions. And often, those who are proactive about searching are also proactive about engaging. This likelihood to engage means digital should be a core component of any well-balanced media plan. But marketers have a long purchase cycle to consider, during which awareness, information, reassurance and loyalty must be established and sustained to help the consumer confidently choose to invest in your brand above all others offering similar services. That’s where traditional media shines.

A good media strategy takes all kinds
Traditional media and their digital counterparts are vital media engines, and through the basic mechanics of media mix theory¹, are inclined to fuel each other in the long purchase cycle.

Here’s a quick breakdown media mix theory, from Media Planning:

• To reach people not reached with the first medium.
• To provide additional repeat exposure in a less expensive, secondary medium after optimum reach is obtained in the first medium.
• To leverage the intrinsic values of a medium to extend the creative effectiveness of the campaign (such as sight and sound on TV, intimate conversation on radio, long copy in print media and precise targeting in digital mediums).
• Synergism, where an effect produced by the sum of the parts is greater than expected by adding together the individual components.

Traditional and digital media are equally and uniquely important in your media strategy mix and you build an effective media mix that contributes to profitable growth, that includes both traditional and digital media.

GM’s Super Bowl commercial helped Ford

Super Bowl Ad Aftermath: Ford Boosted By GM’s Fallout?

Playing dirty might be de rigeur in politics, but it seldom helps in selling products—even dusty pickups ravaged by the apocalypse.

That might end up being GM’s tough lesson from its Super Bowl XLVI ad which, to some, spoke less about the strengths of GM products than it did attack Ford’s reputation for durability and longevity.

GM’s Super Bowl commercial helped Ford

Based on traffic and visitor data collected by the shopping and pricing site Kelley Blue Book, more visitors browsed Fordafter the GM commercial—a lot more—even though Ford didn’t have a big Super Bowl ad. Whether looking at the controversy in the days surrounding, or specifically at the window of time during and after the ad aired, Fordappeared to benefit most, if an immediate browsing or shopping of new vehicles was the goal.

Full-size pickup truck visitors on Super Bowl Sunday, 2012 – Kelley Blue Book

KBB.com data shows consumer interest in the Silverado lifting during the commercial airing, leveling off after the commercial and declining after the game, as interest in the F-150 surged, curiously. Despite the Silverado’s lift during the game, Ford’s F-150 still drew a greater share of week-over-week attention from KBB.com consumers.

In comparing consumer interest on kbb.com among the Full-size truck segment, KBB analyst Akshay Anand noted that the share of visits to the F150 surged over 26-percent week-over-week, while the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 saw a 25-percent drop in traffic during the same period.

“Looking at the data for that whole day, Ford did see some lift, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence,” said Anand.

That leads to how some might have heard the commercial…something along the lines of this: What kind of truck do you drive to the impending apocalypse? If it’s a Ford, oh you sorry sap, you’re just not going to make it.

Advertising 101: Don’t make the competing product your punchline

And that hits hard at one very important factor: brand loyalty. To many, the commercial was less a declaration of the strengths of GM products than it was the buildup to an attack on Ford’s trucks. And it may have sent Ford loyalists to their laptops and tablets to search for reassurance about Ford’s reputation, as their GM counterparts gloated and stayed on the sofa.

“Truck owners tend to be more loyal than those in any other segment,” said Anand, and when a product with that level of loyalty is mentioned negatively in an ad, argued Anand, the response is likely to be one that’s on the defensive.

Other potential explanations: Ford was mentioned bluntly and clearly right near the end of the ad, so is that somehow the name that stuck with viewers? Or does the lesson to be learned really have more to do with etiquette?

It is, after all, one of the first commercials in some time to blatantly call out a competing product without mention of a number or metric as basis.

Here are the latest online video advertising numbers

December 29, 2011

Though advertisers and agencies are often increasing their investments in digital video advertising at the expense of offline/traditional branding/advertising efforts, findings from DIGIDAY and Adap.tv suggest funding also comes at the expense of current display advertising budgets.

According to a November study, advertisers were more likely to fund their online video advertising efforts from offline channels such as print and broadcast TV than their agency counterparts. Advertisers most often planned to shift budget from print (41%), while 29% said they would take dollars from broadcast TV to fund their digital video advertising efforts. Just 24% planned to pull from display.

Agencies said boosts to online video budgets would most come at the expense of display (43%), indicating a general move away from less dynamic ad formats, such as banner ads, in favor of those with greater engagement potential.

In addition, 39% of agencies said they would fund video from broadcast TV budgets. Though findings appear to suggest advertisers and agencies are shifting budgets away from TV toward video ads, more than half (56%) of respondents viewed online video as a direct complement to—and not a replacement for—their TV ad programs. Just 11% looked to online video to replace their TV ads, reported eMarketer.

In the past year, both advertisers and agencies have shifted their primary video advertising objectives from brand awareness to brand engagement, perhaps suggesting marketers are moving away from viewing digital video as a mere extension of TV ads and moving toward embracing online video for its ability to more directly engage viewers in a dynamic way.

By enabling video ads with social sharing and other calls to action, marketers can use digital video as a springboard to additional online engagement on social networks, their website and even mobile apps.

Mobile is a growing area of interest for video advertisers, yet publisher offerings lag brand adoption. For example, 42% of advertisers and agencies have purchased iPhone-compatible video ads, yet only 35% of publishers supported such ads. Differences for Android video ads (31% vs. 28%, respectively) and iPad ads (41% vs. 35%) were similar.

Are Daily Deal Sites a Good Deal for Small Businesses?

A new report from Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research indicates that the majority of consumers who redeem prepaid vouchers already were customers of the brand or business that was offering the deal. For clothing and shoe stores, this number is as high as 80 percent, according to the report.

Meanwhile, more than half of the customers surveyed for the report, called “Myths And Truths About Daily Deals,” say they would have made a purchase regardless of having the coupon voucher.

Another big issue is exactly how many people are paying attention to these deal offers, especially over email. “While Groupon vaunts the size of its ‘subscriber base,’ all evidence points to the medium becoming less important,” says Forrester vice president and senior analyst Sucharita Mulpuru, who co-authored the report. “A significant portion of people who once subscribed to these emails no longer do, and many simply don’t want to because they have no need for more clutter in their inboxes.”

300+ million users now access Facebook via mobile apps

Facebook is being boosted by app use, with it being reported in the last couple of days the world’s largest social network saw monthly active users of its mobile apps pass 300 million users.

Enders Analysis analyst Benedict Evans writes that the figure is correct as of 27 December, with iOS and Android applications accounting for more than two-thirds of mobile app use on the social network.

Evans uses Facebook’s own mobile data, comparing iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Symbian and featurephone use, to the network’s 800 million total users and 350 million mobile users, which the company announced at the end of September.

Evans writes:

Quite unsurprisingly, these are dominated by the two platforms that have traction, iOS and Android. As Techcrunch pointed out a few days ago, Android has now passed iOS in DAUs, though Apple has passed the round 100m MAU figure.

Windows Phone remains quite insignificant, though that may change next year as Nokia’s efforts come fully on stream. Meanwhile around 70% of RIM’s 70m active users have installed the Facebook app. That’s a high penetration rate (it comes to around 50% for Android and iOS) on what is supposed to be a corporate product, pointing to RIM’s strength in messaging, but also to the way that the mix is shifting away from business customers and towards emerging markets and teenaged girls (in the UK at least).

From his breakdown, Evans deduces that 70% of mobile users and more than 30% of all users used apps to access Facebook.

Facebook has worked hard to rebuild its mobile websites, partnering with operators worldwide to offer free access to its service. The company also introduced social app discovery on its mobile website, making it almost as feature-rich as its apps.

Apple Devices Dominate Mobile Online Shopping

The holiday season came a little early for Apple this year, but it’s not as if the company didn’t already know what it was getting. New statistics released this week from retail analysis firm RichRelevance indicate that iPads and iPhones are the top mobile devices that consumers use to make retail purchases.

By just how much, you ask? According to RichRelevance, 92 percent of all “online non-desktop sales” came from an iOS-friendly device during December. Better still (for retailers), those using their iPhones, iPads, and other iOS devices to shop online spent more, on average, than those shopping via other mobile platforms like Android: $123 for iOS devices versus $101 for Android devices. Even though desktop-based sales crushed mobile-based purchases in volume, the average order value of these purchases only reached $87.

“The numbers across our retailing partners sites demonstrate just how powerful the iOS platform is enabling mobile web shopping and, while still below 5 percent in total conversion, mobile traffic’s doubling in eight months is a trend we only see accelerating,” said David Selinger, RichRelevance CEO, in a statement.

In total, mobile device-based shopping hit around 3 percent of all online sales analyzed by RichRelevance—more than 3.4 billion sales in total, stretched across the months of April to mid-December. Translated out to raw dollars, mobile-based sales jumped from 1.87 percent of all U.S. online retail spending in April to 3.74 percent in December.

As mentioned, this news should come as little surprise to Apple, as the company has already seen snapshots of iOS mobile shopping dominance. Take, for example, Black Friday: According to IBM, the iPhone and iPad ranked first and second for consumer shopping on mobile devices on Black Friday itself (5.4 percent and 4.8 percent, with Android-based devices taking up third at 4.1 percent). That totals just over 10 percent of the mobile shopping market for Apple’s flagship products.

IBM also indicated that the specific Black Friday conversion rates for the iPad—a comparison of online visits versus purchases made—were double those of the mobile device category as a whole (4.6 percent to 2.8 percent.)

Even though Android enjoys a healthy lead in overall global market share for smartphones versus the iPhone—no doubt a result of Android’s ability to exist on multiple devices versus the single iOS smartphone product line—it seems that iOS users continue to carry the day for mobile shopping.

Apple’s Siri Could Destroy Local SEO

It’s worth taking the time to learn more about the iPhone 4S’s digital ambassador Siri , as it could represent the future direction of local search engine optimization.

On the surface, Siri — the voice recognition app that allows iPhone users to control their cell phones verbally — seems like a cool party trick, sending text messages from your spoken instructions, checking the weather and setting up calendar reminders. But does this added functionality really mean the end of traditional local SEO as some experts are predicting?

In some ways, yes. The real impact of Siri isn’t just that she acts like a personal assistant. The potentially huge ramifications for local SEO come from the depth of information Siri is able to access and the range of actions she can perform.

For example, Siri can call you a cab after a night on the town by automatically processing information about local cab companies in response to the query, “Call me a cab.” Automating the search process means you never look up “cab companies in your area” in the search engines, avoiding the traditional search engine results pages and pay-per-click advertisements entirely, therefore limiting their importance and influence.

Little is known about how exactly Siri collects and processes information, although it’s reasonable to assume that the program is drawing on well-cultivated public data sources, including Google Places, Yelp and similar sites. If Siri is eventually able to pull information from third party apps — as many predict she will be — she could effectively eliminate traffic to some traditional websites. As an example, automatically checking people in to Facebook places eliminates the need to visit those places’ websites.

 And when you take into consideration that the iPhone 4S has become the company’s best-selling iPhone in just a few short weeks, due in large part to the innovative Siri technology, localbusiness owners should take note of this trend and invest time in optimizing their sites for mobile discovery.

Here’s what you need to do to make your business website as accessible as possible to Siri and related voice recognition tools:

Optimize your website for mobile. This isn’t new advice, as the rules for mobile SEO — and the idea of local SEO in general — have been around for years. But as some sources estimate that 30 percent of all searches could include a local component by 2015, it’s more important than ever to make local SEO a priority for your business.

In addition to thinking about how consumers access your website while on the go, consider whether or not Siri can access important information about your business as well. Here’s what you need to do:

• Add a mobile site template. Having users land on a mobile version of your website willmake them much happier, and it isn’t difficult to do, as mobile-ready themes already exist for publishing platforms including WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.
• Enhance your local SEO. Prominently feature your physical address, local phone number and operating hours on the home page of your site for maximum local SEO benefits.
• Remove data obstructions. Yes, Flash graphics and Javascript are already “no-no’s” when it comes to mobile optimization, but also consider how easily Siri can access the information on your site. Burying pertinent information in PDFs and sub-pages could put your site at a disadvantage.

Enhance your digital presence. It’s no longer enough to simply set up profiles on Facebook and Twitter and call it a day. Instead, establish a profile on any of the following directories and review sites and encourage customers to rate your business there for maximum exposure.

• Google Places
• Yahoo Local
• Bing Local
• Yelp
• Grubhub
• Open Table
• Urbanspoon

• Foursquare
• Savings.com
• Retailmenot
• Judy’s Book
• Citysearch
• Superpages
• Yellow Pages

To determine which of these options are the best fit for your business, do a quick search to see which business sites in your geographic area and industry are ranking well in Google and create profiles on whichever of the following sites they’re using.

Implement microdata. If you’re savvy in the ways of SEO or have an IT manager who is you’ll want to consider adding “schema tags” to your website. Schema tags allow your site to incorporate relevant microdata — local business, address, telephone and open hours, for example — that could help Siri and the search engines process important information about your site more quickly.

While Siri on her own doesn’t necessarily spell the end of local SEO it’s worth taking note of the popularity this mobile data management system has gained in a relatively short period of time. As Siri evolves and other operating systems adopt similar technology, the businesses that benefit most will be those that best understand how their customers interact in a mobile environment and optimize their sites to engage them.

 

40% of Tablet /Smartphone Owners Use Them While Watching TV Almost 20% searched for product information, coupons or deals while watching TV

American consumers are increasingly connected and our recent survey shows they are increasingly multitasking when it comes to multimedia.

Roughly 40 percent of tablet and smartphone owners in the U.S. used their devices daily while watching TV, while only 14 percent of eReader owners said they watched TV while using their device every day.

And what are smartphone and tablet owners doing while watching TV? Checking email. Email was the top activity for both men and women during television programming and commercial breaks. In addition, women reported engaging in social networking more than men, while men checked sports scores more often.

Advertisers should take note that while viewers may be splitting attention between two (or three!) screens, 19 percent of smartphone and tablet owners searched for product information and 13 percent searched for coupons or deals while the television was on.