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Since the birth of e-commerce, marketing experts have disagreed about the future

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Since the birth of e-commerce, marketing experts have disagreed about the future role of brands.
  • Some have predicted that digital technologies will hasten the demise of brands because customers will have ready access to information they need to make purchase decisions, and “brand” will, therefore, become less relevant.
  • Others have prophesied an increasing importance of brand as a simple way to evaluate choices in an era of information overkill.
To find out which school of thought is more accurate, we looked at the value of brands and customer relationships as revealed by M&A data covering over 6,000 mergers and acquisitions worldwide between 2003 and 2013. The beauty of M&A for examining valuation trends is that M&As reveal the dollar valuations of all assets at the time of the acquisition. Upon acquiring a business, companies have to value the different assets they acquired for their accounts and balance sheet in accordance with accounting and reporting standards. These valuations include – among other assets – brands (trademarks) and customer relationships.
 
This graph, based on data from the MARKABLES database, represents brand and customer relationship valuations as a percent of total enterprise value. The percentages come from fair value assessments done by purchase price allocation experts according to established accounting standards.
 
 
As the graph bracingly shows, brand valuations declined by nearly half (falling from 18% to 10%) while customer relationship values doubled (climbing from 9% to 18%) over a decade. All other categories of intangibles remained stable. These numbers reveal a dramatic shift in the strategic approach to marketing over the last 10 years. Acquirers have decisively moved from investing into businesses with strong brands to businesses with strong customer relationships.
M&A strategies often concentrated on brands and on growing brands through better brand management and internationalization.
  • Today, such brand growth strategies appear to be either limited or too expensive.
  • Instead, M&A strategies now concentrate more on acquiring firms with strong customer relationships – with all the loyalty and cross-selling benefits that confers.
This trend is powerfully reinforced by digital technologies. These allow more direct interactions with customers, bypassing expensive middlemen and reducing the cost of sales and marketing; they allow firms to optimize customer lifecycle management based on detailed data and analysis of customers’ needs; they improve efficiency and quality across the value chain as a result of continuous customer feedback; and, finally, they facilitate the realization of merging two brands into one, or rebranding. As a result, the price of direct engagement with customers relative to traditional branding and media campaigns has dropped while the effectiveness of such marketing efforts has grown.
There is a parallel development on the demand (customer) side. Digitalization makes information, including information about brands, easily accessible. For example, a customer shopping for a new car can now instantly examine and compare the specifications and performance of different car models.
Thus, purchasing decisions have become more fact based, and less brand-image based. Customers still value strong brands, but what constitutes a strong brand is now more dependent on customers’ direct experience with an offering, and with their relationship with the firm that produces it.
 
Marketing resources now directed at brand building should be more fully integrated with those designed to reinforce relationships. Strong brand communications are and will remain important especially in attracting new customers and in enhancing desirability for higher price premiums.
 
As Peter Drucker said, well before the advent of the information age, the sole purpose of a business is to create a customer.
source hbr.org/2015/04/why-strong-customer-relationships-trump-powerful-brands
 

Attracting Audience Attention

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How to Attract an Audience with Creating Captivating Content

 
 

To be successful, every business has to tell its stories.

These days, such stories are usually told through posting content online in blogs, articles and social media.
  • But just pushing content onto the web is meaningless if it doesn’t interest the audience. In an online world bursting with billions and billions of pages of content — with new content being added every minute.
  • how do you ensure you’re creating compelling content that generates views?
  • Whether it’s defining the details that will capture interest, timing your posts to grab the most views or choosing the right venue for your message, there are strategies that will help your online voice be heard.

1. Cater Content To Customers

As a printing company, our target companies are other businesses that need printed collateral, as well as individuals that have a specific need. Content about our latest printer is not effective. However, design tips or examples for wedding invitations, how-tos, or graphic design tips for other businesses will create value that organically leads to sales. Your content does not have to revolve specifically around your goods or services. Rather, cross-pollenating your content into the desired industries you would like to sell to is an effective way to create value and sales. – Brandon Stapper, Nonstop Signs
 

2. Choose The Best Platform For Each Message

Different channels accomplish different types of engagement. Facebook is great for showing company culture. We find images and behind-the-scenes videos get the most likes and shares. For Twitter, we’re testing tweets that are story driven; you create a thread, and each tweet links to different content that threads up around a point. This is a great way to repurpose multiple pieces of content, and it drives conversation with people commenting on tweets. Instagram is obviously image and video driven. The trick with Instagram is choosing the right hashtag to get the right visibility. If you’re looking for leads, you’ll need users to download an asset that’s useful. We’ve been doing checklists on how to do something accompanied by a case study that proves it works. – Kerry Guard, MKG Marketing
 

3. Write Step-By-Step Guides

I’ve noticed that some of our best content is how-to guides that show users a step-by-step process on how to implement something on their own website. This has helped gear us to becoming more of a resource-based blog where customers can find information on how to make their own sites better. Find out what guides your customers want and write a detailed, step-by-step process that will help them. You can even turn some of your most popular ones into content upgrades in exchange for email addresses. – Jared Atchison, WPForms
 

4. Round Up The Experts

When producing content, a helpful strategy is to include experts with relevant experience on the particular topic you are producing content around. By including these experts and their take on a specific issue, you’re providing them with a platform to share their thoughts and ideas and increasing your chances of them sharing your content with their audience — “seeding” the content with additional readers. If the content is well-received, the results will compound from there. – Brandon Pindulic, OpGen Media
 

5. Answer The Questions You’re Always Asked

Answering tough questions about our industry has been a boon for traffic to our site. Some of our top-performing pieces are articles on how much an app costs to build and on how much money an app can make. Think about the questions clients or potential clients ask you all the time, and then go and create blog posts to answer those questions. – Ryan D Matzner, Fueled
 

6. Take On Trending Topics In Your Industry

I’ve noticed that the content that tends to get the most engagement on my company’s blog and my social media channels is around topics that are disruptive to the industry. For example, in the digital marketing industry, some of my most shared and engaging content dealt with new trends, such as voice search and mobile AMP (accelerated mobile pages). The keys for greater engagement and cultivating thought leadership are to provide helpful context and actionable information that empowers your readers. Don’t be a journalist, be a thought leader instead! – Kristopher Brian Jones, LSEO.com

7. Pitch Solutions, Not Products

No one wants to hear your sales pitch. No one is as excited about your product as you are. What they want to see is someone like them who’s struggling with the same issues. Then they want to see you fix those issues. Case study marketing is the way to go. It’s organic, it’s not just about you and others want to share it. At Enlighten we spend a remarkable amount of time working with clients after the sale to follow up and document the successes. These successes become inspiration for others that see them. Case studies have people asking you for help rather than you asking them for business. – Jeremy Jacobs, Enlighten

8. Integrate Insightful Interviews

Interviews are a great way to generate traffic to your site. Find people in your industry to interview and send them a few questions. You can then post your article in a question-answer format and optimize it for SEO. The trick is to find people that your audience is interested in learning from and asking them questions the audience would like to know. You can create a poll on your site to find out who your audience would like featured on your site. – Chris Christoff, MonsterInsights
 

9. Livestream For Authenticity

Content that receives the most engagement for us is livestreaming on Instagram. For instance, after I released my most recent book, I did a handful of Instagram livestreams with other entrepreneurs, and each segment received more engagement than any other type of content marketing we produced. Livestreaming is the most transparent way to showcase your knowledge and expertise without sounding scripted or rehearsed. – Kristin Kimberly Marquet, Creative Development Agency, LLC

10. Tap Into Holiday Spirit

Is there an important date or popular holiday coming up? Injecting your brand (in an authentic way) allows you to take advantage of its popularity. Posting content that taps into the interest of a given date almost always guarantees fantastic engagement. Holidays such as Christmas or Valentine’s Day are obviously days you want to take advantage of. You can also time your content to coincide with the release of a popular movie or more niche holidays, such as “National French Fry Day” or “Star Wars Day.” Timing your content to highlight special days allows for predictability. It’s simple, and you can easily track results. It also allows you to tap into niche or international audiences that you may not otherwise reach. – Shu Saito, Fact Retriever
 
 
 
mike stuart, 1stonline.us
 

Content is the fuel that engages your audience on social media.

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Content is the fuel that engages your audience on social media.
To engage (meaning) to succeed in attracting and keeping somebody’s attention and interest.

Here are nine proven ways to create and share engaging social media content.
  • Stop Using Text, Start Showing. …
  • Use High-Quality Stock Photography. …
  • Recycle Your Evergreen Content into Infographics. …
  • Share Customer Testimonials & Reviews. …
  • Search Visual Trends on Pinterest. …
  • Host Contests & Surveys.

Content marketing plays a big role for social media marketing, because of these connecting elements that help in shaping content marketing strategy for social media:
  1. Goals
  2. Target audience
  3. Product preview
  4. Communication
  5. Plans
In order to succeed in social media campaigns or marketing, the first thing you have to do is to set your goals or objectives. What do you want to achieve? Who is your target audience? How many people are you targeting? When is your deadline? When you have set your goals and targeted audience, from there, social media starts taking place. On social media, you can start taking notes of those people who seem to be your perfect criteria for your target audience.

Once you get the perfect idea about who your target audience will be, you can start previewing your products and classifying them into some parts that depend on your target audience’s age, gender, or locations. From that, you can plan strategies on how to approach your target audience and communicate with them. Yes, even communication needs strategies, because how you deliver a message to your target audience will define what their response will be. With social media combined with strategic planning, you can communicate better with your target audience, your existing customers and even with your potential customers. Now after maintaining good communication with your audience, you can start making marketing plans.

Marketing plan here means that you create a content plan and test it first. In case it does not work out, you try to create solutions based on the problems or things that lack in that content plan. Then re-create the whole plan with new strategies, before executing it on social media. Good combination between content marketing and social media can be the key to great marketing strategies for the future.

Arranging the objectives

When you combine content marketing with social media, you have to be focused on these objectives in mind:
  • Help your target audience understand your products or services better
  • Entertain your target audience with your interesting content
  • Educate your target audience on new trends and best practices
  • Tell your target audience about the challenge of the current situation
  • Convince your target audience to buy your products or use your services and tell them why they need it
reference: bestinau.com.au

The Death of Microsoft’s LinkedIn’s SlideShare

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In 2016, SlideShare had over 70 million unique visitors per day, and it was listed by Alexa as one of the top 100 most visited websites in the world. At its peak, it was such a powerhouse that Obama used the network to post his birth certificate. It also stood for years as a premier B2B social channel: In 2015, author and marketing expert Jay Baer referred to it as “content marketing’s secret weapon.”

 
 
Power users have been dropping the SlideShare channel.
 
  • Top content creator and SlideShare investor Dave McLure hasn’t posted to the channel in over 11 months.
  • HubSpot, the content marketing powerhouse that posted over 60 presentations in 2017 and reached over 500,000 users, has posted only once in 2018, reaching a total of just over 1,000 users.
  • So what has caused this exodus of power users and decline in social-media prominence? A perfect storm of shifting parent-company priorities, insufficient revenues, and a user base largely outside of the US.
 
Despite SlideShare’s massive fan base, loyal users, and billions of impressions, a once-powerful channel is all but dead, and here’s why.
 
The Loss of Human Touch
The rapid growth of SlideShare from a small startup to a top website began in 2009, in a tiny room in India, when Amit Rajan, Rashmi Sinha, and Jonathan Boutelle saw the need for a “YouTube for presentations.” Within a few years, they had built a network of 38 million registered users by providing a desperately needed tool—and a new social channel for presentations.  But the key to their success wasn’t the tool, it was the human touch it added to the presentations.
 
SlideShare didn’t have a marketing team fueling its rapid growth. It relied on loyal fans. Its fans were the content creators, and to ensure the best content was featured, the team at SlideShare would manually curate the site each day, ensuring that the best presentations were prominently featured.
  • Kit Seeborg, author of Present Yourself: Using SlideShare to Grow Your Business, was responsible for most of the content curation the users loved, she stressed how important human curation was to SlideShare.
  • The curated content was a huge hit. It was also one of the drivers of SlideShare’s email list, which, at the time of LinkedIn’s acquisition of SlideShare in 2012, was growing by 250,000 new subscribers each week. After the sale to LinkedIn, the curation process remained a critical part of community-building, until 2016, when the program was ended. Since then, the homepage has changed very little, which was a major clue to marketing insiders that LinkedIn was giving up on SlideShare.
  • During 2016, the team of editors who had been curators for SlideShare were moved off the product to support other LinkedIn projects, such as Pulse. The SlideShare company page on LinkedIn is now blank, with only a few remaining engineers listed as employees.
 
Some alternatives to SlideShare:
  1. Host your own content. There are new plugins for websites which allow you to host your slides on your own website and allow easy sharing and embedding. 
  2. Microsoft may create a social PowerPoint for 365. That is speculation, but now that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, and with the recent move to put Office in the Cloud, we could potentially see a new social aspect of PowerPoint in the future. 
  3. Use Prezi. It’s an alternative to SlideShare, but it does require you create content in Prezi’s own software rather than in PowerPoint; that requirement can be a pain for some.
  4. Use Google or Dropbox or ISSUU document sharing with their built-in presentation handling.
As we are continually bombarded with new marketing channels, tactics, and tools, one thing is clear: Slides are not going away. Events seem to give brands the personal touch the digital world just can’t, and slides are usually the No.1 content type at events.
 
The “YouTube of presentations” was at one point the number one destination for business owners and managers. It sported better demographics and site visitor loyalty than even LinkedIn. It was one of the top 100 most visited websites on the planet. Maybe that’s why LinkedIn bought it for $119 million in 2012, padding the nest eggs of serial investors and Slideshare backers Mark Cuban and Dave McClure, among others.
 
The 3 Biggest Slideshare Problems Today
 
  1. First, traffic to Slideshare has fallen off considerably. This is despite the fact that three-quarters of all content marketers are creating more content than ever, according to the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. To be sure not all of that content is in the form of presentations and ebooks that are found on Slideshare. 
  2. Second, Slideshare has jettisoned their editorial team, for the most part. At its apex, part of Slideshare’s appeal was its curation, including regular promotion of new and interesting presentations to the site’s home page in the “Today’s Top Slideshares,” “Featured Slideshares,” or “Trending in Social Media” sections.
  3. Third, Slideshare now appears to be making puzzlingly awful customer experience decisions. I have no idea if this is correlation or causation.
 
Slideshare’s coming passing comes on the heels of the death of Squidoo and Scribd, among others.
 
 
 

Top Content Creators use the title “How a Brand Does Something”

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Top Content Creators often use articles with a title similar to the following template:

How (Brand) Is Doing (Something) to Achieve (Result) to Draw a Bigger Audience 

 
 
 
Why this content model works | (name-jacking)
  • Brand name recognition
    Nielsen wanted to determine why people purchased specific products. What did it find? Brand!

  • Influencer involvement
    These articles are, by definition, exploring how awesome these companies are. They’re literally saying, “If (brand) does it, it must be worth trying.” The brand gets external links, a huge trust boost, and an increased brand awareness it probably doesn’t need (but never hurts).

     

 

5 steps to use this article model

To create your own content using this article model, follow these five steps.

1. Identify an innovative company or thought leader

The most challenging part is determining what business to target. Once you get that down, the rest of the article follows a path set by them, not you.
Here are a few guidelines:
  • Identify a business that doesn’t feel too out of reach. Avoid megabrands such as Apple, Coca-Cola, or Salesforce, as it’ll be tough for your reader to relate to the strategies they’re implementing.
  • Identify a business implementing innovative or interesting strategies. It should be doing something worth writing about. Your article will be harder to write (and less interesting) if you pick a big brand name that isn’t doing something exciting.
  • Target a business doing something interesting related to your business. There’s no point in getting people excited about a strategy that doesn’t relate to your business.

2. Start your research

Explore the company’s sales funnel. Start with the first possible touch-point. Try a search or display advertisement, a blog article, a press release, etc.
As you proceed through the funnel – from ad or article to lead generation to email marketing to sales prompt, take screenshots. Your article will be framed by that funnel.
 

3. Reach out to a representative

You want the company on your side before you publish your insight and observations about what it does. And, if possible, you want information from the company. Try something like this:
Hey [first name of contact],
Hope this finds you well. I am (your name) and was talking to your colleague, (name), and she mentioned you were the one behind (specific strategy you’re writing about). I’d like to congratulate you on putting together one of the most innovative marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen.
Your (specific strategy) would be an awesome topic for an article I would like to write. I would appreciate it if you would have the time for an interview to walk through what you’ve done and inspire other marketers to do something similar. Would you have 15 minutes this week to jump on a call so I can ask you a few questions about the thinking behind the strategy and if it’s performing for you guys?
I look forward to hearing from you!
If they don’t have time for a call, send over a few questions and ask if they have time to respond that way. And if they don’t have time for that, write the article without their involvement, but share the link once it’s done. You’ll still get the bump from a recognizable brand name in your title and the brand will have been made aware your article is being published.
 

4. Go a step above with design

Your article ideally will be at least 2,000 words and broken into several sections. As a result, a table of contents will help readers navigate.
You can format an automated table of contents within your article..
 

5. Promote to specific influencers

If you need help creating an influencer list, use a tool like BuzzSumo.
  • Research the influencers before you reach out to them to better
  • Learn if they are interested in content similar to what you’re doing.
  • Follow them on social media.
  • Then reach out to the influencer and Personalize the outreach.
This is a form of name-jacking!
 
Mike Stuart, 1stonline.us