MackCollier.com

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Research: Online and Offline Conversations Account for 19% of Sales

An exciting new study from Engagement Labs (Formerly Keller-Fay) had some very interesting takeaways for brands concerning the impact that online and offline WOM has on sales.  The study tracked the correlations between conversations (online and offline) and sales for 170 brands.  The research found 19% of sales resulted from both online and offline conversations.  Further, the study found that both sources contributed almost equally; 10% of sales resulted from offline conversations (Word of Mouth) and 9% resulted from online conversations (Social Media).

The study also looked at how a brand uses social media can impact sales: “By improving social performance by just 10 percent, the brands included in this study can realize a two percent increase in sales and large improvements in profit margins compared to business-as-usual figures. For example, the sentiment of conversations, both online and offline, were proven to be a big driver of performance. Therefore, by improving sentiment, a brand can experience a sales lift.”

The More Positive the Conversation Around Your Brand, the Higher Your Sales

So let’s unpack that previous paragraph a bit. If a brand improves the efficiency of its social media efforts by 10%, it realizes a 2% increase in sales. That alone is incredibly significant. But additionally, positive sentiment about a brand online and off leads to an increase in sales.

And what group is the biggest driver of positive sentiment about your brand online?  Your happy customers!  Your biggest fans are not only the biggest contributors of positive conversations around and about your brand, but they are also the group that is the most motivated to talk positively about your brand!

This is precisely why I am so dedicated to helping companies better connect with and empower their happy customers. Additionally, customers are more likely to listen to and trust a fellow customer than they are a marketing message that comes directly from a brand! You know this to be true from your own experiences: Which are you more likely to trust; A commercial for a brand, or an endorsement for that same brand from a customer you meet in a store? You’re going to trust the customer over the commercial, right?  Of course you are.

If you want to improve the sentiment of the conversation around your brand online, then make sure your happy customers are more active participants in that conversation.  That’s it.  If you don’t take a role in engaging your happy customers, they will be less likely to create positive content around and about your brand online.  Which will lead to fewer sales.

But we want you to have more sales. And as this study found, just a 10% increase in the efficiency of your social media efforts results in a 2% increase in sales.  For a small business with at least one employee, average annual revenue is $4.9 million.   So if a small business with one employee could improve its social media efforts by just 10%, it could realize an increase in sales of $98,000.00.

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Social Media Isn’t Hard, Your Company Makes it Hard

I spend very little time here breaking down how to use social media tools.  I don’t do the deep dives that some other sites engage in where they show you all the advanced tips on how to get the most bang out of Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat.

Here’s the reason why: It’s not about understanding the tools, it’s about understanding the people that are using the tools. Becoming a Facebook ninja isn’t going to help your business a damn bit if you don’t understand why your customers are on Facebook and what activities they are engaging in.  Understand your customers first, then you can focus on understanding the tools.

Here’s an example: I constantly teach clients how they can better leverage social media to connect directly with their customers and improve engagement.  A dead simple way to do this is to follow this process: Respond to every customer mention of a specific interaction with your company.  If the mention is positive, thank them.  If the mention is negative, followup with them to get more information and figure out how you can best resolve the interaction to the satisfaction of the customer.  Of course there are other ways to respond and engage with customers, but companies love and even need processes, and this is a great starting point.

In short, if a customer mentions doing business with your company, you respond. For those of us reading this that sit on the customer side of the fence, this makes complete sense. Yet for many companies, its waters they are hesitant to wade into for fear of the unknown.

But it really is low-hanging fruit that companies can easily grasp to improve their digital efforts to engage with customers and increase customer loyalty. Case in point, yesterday during #AdobeChat, we were discussing how businesses in the tourism and hospitality industries should engage with tourists or customers that are creating UGC. At one point I left this tweet:

Then later, Enterprise finds that tweet and replies with…

And then I reply with…

It truly is this easy. I mentioned Enterprise (notice I didn’t even mark the mention as a reply, which proves they were purposely monitoring brand mentions), they responded and thanked me, then I pointed out their good behavior to everyone in #AdobeChat. BTW, there were dozens if not hundreds of business travelers in this particular chat, so that type of positive promotion is golden.

And it all started with Enterprise being smart enough to engage. Why isn’t your company doing the same?

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The Rise of the T-Shaped Influencer

T-Shaped Influencer

About 10 years ago, it was incredibly cool to call yourself a ‘social media consultant’. Social media in a business context was new and exciting (and in too many ways still is 10 years later), and those that marketed themselves as social media consultants were coveted.

Yet even as social media consultants were enjoying popularity, a few were sounding potential alarms. Eventually, the market would mature, and companies would need more specialized skills from their consultants. Over time, this has indeed happened. Companies no longer need to hire as many social media consultants and agencies as they once did, now they hire employees and conduct much of their social media and digital strategies in-house. Social media consultants have gone from being generalists to more specialized.  In the last few years we’ve seen the rise of specialized social media positions in analytics, content creation, and community management, among others.

As the market matures, needs become more specialized. The same thing is beginning to happen with Influencer Marketing. I first started working with clients on influencer campaigns in 2010. Then, the rationale for picking influencers was simply ‘biggest number wins’. Sure, it was best if we could connect with influencers in the specific industry that was relevant to the campaign, but if not, any influencer with a few hundred thousand followers on Twitter would do. I tried my best to explain to these clients that it wasn’t about the overall numbers, it was about how connected and influential the influencer truly was over their followers. The smart clients understood this, and their campaigns were successes.

Digital Ad Spends Are Way Up, Everyone is Using An Ad-Blocker

Two interesting stats that dovetail: digital ad spending is set to hit $100 Billion by 2020, while at the same time, ad-blocker usage spiked by 34% since 2015, with 70 million Americans now blocking online ads. This is another reason why Influencer Marketing is so appealing to many brands. Consumers are increasingly distrustful of any advertisement. Influencers give marketers the ability to reach an audience through a more trusted source: The influencer. Instead of running ads on a blog that will be ignored, a brand can instead partner with the blogger directly to have them create original content that promotes the brand. Ideally, the influencer will be smart enough to create the content in a way that creates value for both the brand, and the influencer’s audience.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen. Companies that invest in influencer marketing are often seeing nebulous results that are difficult to distill any meaningful value from. Some of this is due to poor planning and execution, as well as partnering with influencers that either weren’t a good fit for their campaign, or who didn’t perform as necessary.

Big Money Means the Need For Bigger Results

Now that we’ve moved past the ‘shiny object’ stage of Influencer Marketing, companies that are still investing in this tactic are increasingly demanding real results for their dollars. As they should. With this, comes re-examining how influencers are chosen. The idea that ‘biggest follower count wins’ is being challenged. Companies are realizing that if an influencer has a big follower count, that just means they have little connection with any of them. And the whole idea behind Influencer Marketing is that brands want to work with people that will influence behavior. If an influencer has little sway over her audience, then it really doesn’t matter if that audience is 100 or 100,000.

In fact, what many brands are beginning to realize is that smaller followings typically mean an influencer has more influence over their audience. The reality is, authentic, personal engagement cannot effectively scale past a certain point. The one-to-one interactions that build trust and result in one person having true influence over the actions of another require a lot of attention. If an influencer has a following of 100,000, it’s frankly impossible for them to have enough time to have personal interactions with even a fraction of that audience.

Which is why T-Shaped Influencers are suddenly in demand by brands. T-Shaped Influencers are influencers that have a narrow focus and following, but a deep connection with that audience. The audience they have influence over is highly specialized, but if they have a connection with the audience you want to reach, it makes more sense from a brand perspective to connect with a T-Shaped Influencer instead of someone with a much larger following, that really has little influence over any of them.

Think of it this way: The traditional influencer with a large following typically has a connection with a lot of people, but a DEEP connection (the type that results in true influence) with only a few people.  So their influence footprint would be wide and shallow.

On the other hand, a T-Shaped Influencer has a very narrow area of people they influence, but their level of influence over that small group is very DEEP. So if you wanted to connect with the small group that the T-Shaped Influencer has a connection with, it makes more sense to work with them versus working with the ‘traditional’ influencer that has a large following, but a loose connection with that following.

Here’s an example: Let’s say your brand is bringing a gas/electric hybrid sports-car to the market, and you want to launch an Influencer Marketing campaign to help support the launch.  Here’s two influencers you could connect with:

1 – Tim, the generalist influencer.  Tim has a following of 350,000 on Twitter and Instagram. He is focused on business and technology, so there’s some overlapping between electronics and hybrid cars.  On average, he charges $350-$700 for an Instagram post or blog post.

2 – Sarah, the T-Shaped Influencer. Sarah has a following of only 5,000 on Facebook and Instagram. But approximately 90% of her following are people that are highly interested in automotive information. On average, she charges $25-$60 for a Facebook update or Instagram post.

 

While Sarah has a much smaller following, she also has an audience that’s far more relevant to a brand that’s launching a hybrid sports-car.  Another beneficial byproduct of Sarah’s smaller following is that she can have much higher levels of engagement with that smaller following.  In fact, when it comes to engagement when working with influencers, smaller number wins.  Influencers on Instagram with a following under 1,000 saw over 15% engagement on their posts, whereas influencers with a following of over 100,000 saw their engagement rates fall to 2.4%.

 

Years ago, an agency contacted me because they wanted to launch an influencer campaign to support a new offering from a client. The agency had already built a list of a few candidates, and they wanted me to see if I could come up with a few more possible influencers to round out their list. Remember this is long before Instagram and Snapchat, in fact Twitter and Facebook were much smaller.  The agency was primarily wanting to see content created on blogs, and promoted on social media.

So after a week or so, I gave them a list of several influencers they should consider. They immediately questioned my choices. “Wait, she only has a few thousand followers on Twitter, why didn’t you get this guy, he has over 100,000 followers!”

“Go look at her blog”, I explained. While she did indeed only have a few thousand followers on Twitter, every post she wrote had engagement that was off the charts. Each post had 50 or so comments, and half were from the blogger.  Her readers loved her, and she loved them.

Then I showed them the blog of the guy that had over 100,000 followers.  We went back months before we could find a single post with a comment.  We went back to his Twitter account, and no one was replying to him, and he wasn’t replying to anyone.  Then I showed them the Twitter account for the girl that only had a few thousand Twitter followers.  Non-stop conversation, and most of the interactions were between her and her blog’s readers.  I told the agency “If you pick this guy, he’s going to cost you a lot of money and his blog post is going to be totally ignored.  If you pick her, she’s going to blog about you on her blog and her readers are going to love it, and you.”

Thankfully, they decided to shift their Influencer Marketing approach away from big numbers, to a more T-Shaped Influencer model.  The agency picked influencers that had a smaller following, but a deeper connection with a specific audience.  And as an aside, this approach led to results that surpassed all goals the agency had set for the campaign.

Your brand should do the same with your Influencer Marketing campaigns. Seek out T-Shaped Influencers that have a smaller following, but a deeper connection to a specific audience.  Remember, you want to work with people that will influence behavior in your favor. Bigger isn’t always better.

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Adobe Summit 2017 Review: The Experience is the Message


For the second year I was lucky enough to join Adobe’s Insider Group and attend the Adobe Summit. At its core, Summit is a user conference for partners who use Adobe’s suite of products such as Experience Cloud. The main conference is a three-day event, and it’s massive. Last year’s attendance was around 10k, and this year saw a 20% increase up to 12k.

The highlight of the first two days are its morning keynotes. The first day is typically focused on key product announcements from Adobe, and this year CEO Shantanu Narayen announced the Adobe Experience Cloud suite of products. The first day also included talks with NatGeo CMO Jill Cress (my fav) and the 2nd day’s keynotes were more on the entertainment side, opening with a performance by Penn and Teller, a talk with Peyton Manning and Ryan Gosling. It also included short talks from key executives from Facebook and the NBA.

And thanks to Adobe, you can view all these keynotes for free. Just click and watch!

The main focus of the event was Adobe challenging attendees to provide better experiences for customers, and using that as a way to differentiate from the competition. Also, one of the subpoints that dovetailed with this was the rise of emerging technologies such as AI, VR and AR. How can these technologies be leveraged by marketers to provide amazing experiences for customers?

One case study session that I really enjoyed was Taylor Guitars talking about how it leverages digital to better connect with customers and give them better experiences.

The buyers journey is personal for Taylor Guitars customers #adobesummit

A post shared by Mack Collier (@mackcollier) on

One of the ‘problems’ with emerging technologies is that so many brands are swept up in a FOMO and decide to jump on the bandwagon because of hype. The smart companies are the ones that don’t set out to use a particular technology, they set out to solve business and customer problems. In doing so, they may find that using a particular emerging technology solves their problem.

Case in point: A few years ago, Taylor Guitars started tackling a problem they discovered in their retail stores. The brand was finding that customers would be interested in a guitar, then check the price tag, then go to their phone to do research on the fly. Often, these customers would decide that they needed to leave and do more research before committing to the purchase. So Taylor Guitars decided to build research functionality into its smartphone app.  Taylor accepted that if its customers were going to do in-store research, that Taylor wanted that research to go through an app that the brand had more control over.  So Taylor customers can use the app to get the research they need on the fly, and they can even text Taylor to get specific product information in seconds, while in the store.  Often, this research can give a customer the last assurance they need to complete the purchase.

The point here is, Taylor didn’t start out trying to figure out how they could start using the emerging technology of SMS and app marketing, instead they set out to solve a business problem: Too many customers weren’t completing the purchase in-store. Taylor discovered what was keeping customers from committing to the purchase, then leveraged emerging digital technologies to solve this problem for its customers.

BTW, while I was at the Adobe Summit, CMO.com interviewed me on this very topic..

So if you are using Adobe products currently at your company or agency, you should seriously consider attending Summit next year. It has amazing content that’s tailored to your exact needs, and the networking is phenomenal. Remember, you can view the keynotes for free, to give you a sense of how awesome this event is.  Additionally, check out my Instagram feed to see the pictures I took last week at Summit.

And registration is already up for 2018, it’s again at The Venetian, which is one of my favorite hotels. Just make sure you bring comfortable walking shoes!

Disclosure: I attended Summit as part of Adobe’s Insider Group. I was compensated by Adobe to attend Summit and work with the company. My content and POV is my own.

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The One Thing You Can Do Today to Make Your Webinars Better

Make your webinars better

Webinars are an incredibly powerful tool to train your employees, to cultivate leads, and provide valuable content for subscribers. They are also very popular because they offer a chance to learn from subject matter experts from the comfort of your home or office.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong with webinars. With many webinars, you’re dealing with three sources that all need to be coordinated live:

1 – The webinar platform

2 – The webinar host

3 – The webinar subject matter expert

 

If there’s a technical issue with any of these sources, the webinar will hit a snag. Here’s a worst-case scenario I had to deal with a few years ago: I was contacted by an organization to do a webinar for them. They were using a webinar platform that had to setup and facilitate the webinar for them. On the day of the webinar, the organization hosting the webinar learned that the webinar platform that was facilitating the webinar had made an error, and hadn’t scheduled the organization to be able to use their system on that day. So we had to resolve that. Then the person that was going to introduce me was late and no one could find her. Then when the webinar finally started, the platform kept crashing as I tried to move through my slidedeck. Needless to say, it wasn’t a very good experience for the attendees, for me, or for the host organization.

Another problem with most webinars is the live Q&A that starts immediately after the webinar in most cases. Typically, attendees will submit questions during the webinar, then afterwards, the subject matter expert will answer a few that have been selected. The problem arises in the screening process. Since the subject matter expert is performing the webinar live, he or she can’t screen the questions coming in. So that duty typically falls to the people at the host organization, who often aren’t familiar with the topic of the webinar, and as a result they are forced to guess at what questions should be answered.

Here’s the One Thing You Can Do to Greatly Improve Your Webinars

As you can see, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with the average webinar. But here’s one simple thing you can do to greatly improve the quality of your webinar as well as the survey results you get from attendees: Let the speaker record the webinar and don’t force them to deliver it live.

Here’s why it makes so much sense to let your speakers deliver a recorded webinar vs a live one:

1 – Live technical snafus by the speaker are eliminated. Instead of relying on the speaker’s computer to work properly, and their internet connection to remain stable, you just hit Play on a video, and it’s done.

2 – The speaker’s quality of delivery is greatly enhanced. By giving the speaker the freedom to submit a recorded webinar, you let them polish their delivery and better explain the topic. Also, it avoids the possibility that something might happen during the speaker’s live delivery to cause a disruption. Such as hearing the speaker say “And in the process, this leads to higher customer retention rates, and that…Fluffy! Don’t drink out of my coffee cup! NO! NO! NO!”

3 – If the webinar is recorded, the speaker can screen questions while it’s playing. This allows the speaker to select better questions and also gives the speaker time to research her answers to improve feedback given.

4 – A recorded webinar means the speaker is free to interact directly with attendees in the webinar as well as promote it to others. The speaker can address questions or confusion with the attendees, or even work directly with them on a specific issue. Trust me, this makes a HUGE impression:

5 – Better engagement from the speaker during the webinar means higher satisfaction from attendees. Let’s be honest, when we attend a webinar, we don’t expect the speaker to engage us DURING the webinar. It’s a big surprise, and often a big thrill. It makes us feel better about the webinar, better about the speaker, and better about the host. It also makes us more likely to attend future webinars from this same speaker and host.

 

I’ve recorded my webinars for years, and I’ve been free to engage directly with the audience during the webinar.  This has resulted in much higher satisfaction scores for my webinars and much happier clients who hire me. If you want to learn more about why my webinars are so successful, click here.

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Want More Customers? Here’s the Two Keys to Improving Your Company’s New Customer Acquisition Rate

How your company can acquire new customersNew Customer Acquisition is often the top marketing priority for the average company. And the marketing costs associated with reaching that goal are often among the largest marketing expenses that company will face. Today I want to talk about two things you can do to improve your company’s new customer acquisition rate, and greatly decrease the associated costs.

Sell the Benefits, Not the Product

You can’t sell a product unless the customer is ready to buy it. One of the biggest marketing mistakes most companies make is they try to sell their product to the customer before they are ready to buy it. When trying to acquire new customers, most companies make the mistake of making the first marketing communications they deliver be product-focused. On the surface, this makes complete sense, you can’t sell the product unless you market it, right?

The problem is, a new customer by definition is a customer that hasn’t bought from you before. Which means at minimum they aren’t familiar with your company, but often they also aren’t familiar with the product you are selling. So if you try to sell new customers on a product that they don’t understand or know why they would want, that marketing message is going to be completely ignored. You are literally trying to sell a product to new customers that they aren’t ready to buy.

So if they aren’t ready to buy your product, what do you sell them?

You sell them the benefits associated with owning your product. New customers won’t know they need or want your product, but they will be interested in the benefits that your product provides.

If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. You don’t sell the product, you sell the benefits the owner gets from the product. And many of the most successful brands in the world have been adopting this approach for years:

Red Bull doesn’t sell an energy drink, it sells what happens after you drink it.

Nike doesn’t sell shoes, it sells the activities you’ll be engaged in while wearing its shoes.

Pedigree doesn’t sell dog food, it sells happy and healthy dogs.

 

New customers often won’t know they need your product, but they will know they need the benefits associated with owning it.  So that’s what you sell them. 

Consider this example: Let’s say your company sells spark plugs. If you want to acquire new customers that don’t know why they should buy your spark plugs (or even what a spark plug is), then how do you speak to them?

One option is to create product-focused marketing. You talk to new customers about what your spark plugs do. You talk about how your spark plugs create a hotter spark that leads to less carbon build-up. You talk about how your spark plugs are tipped with platinum instead of copper. You tell the new customer that you are trying to acquire how your spark plug is made from the best materials.

And the reality is, you might as well be throwing your money away. Because the new customer has no idea why less carbon build-up is important, or why a hotter spark is important. So your marketing message is completely irrelevant to them.

The way to win the new customer’s business is to instead sell them on the benefits of owning your spark plugs. You tell them that buying your spark plugs will make their car more reliable. You tell them how it will increase gas mileage by creating a more efficient burn of the fuel. You tell them how it will result in the car running smoother and with more power.

Those are the benefits that new customers are ready to buy. So you sell them what they are ready to buy. Then, after you’ve gotten their attention by communicating the benefits to them, at that point you can talk to them about the product features because at that point, they will be interested in learning more about the product itself.

Remember:

1 – Sell the BENEFITS of the product first to New Customers. That gets their attention and makes them interested in learning more.

2 – When they are ready to learn more, THEN you sell them on the product itself.

Still not getting it? Check out this post.

 

Excited? You should be, but hold on, there’s an even better way to improve the rate at which you acquire new customers…

 

Your Best Customers Are Your Best Marketing

The best salespeople for your company are your current, happy customers. Period. There’s four reasons why:

1 – Your current customers understand new customers better than you do. While you may not have an existing relationship with new customers, your current customers do. Because those new customers are often their friends and family. As such, your current customers can promote your products in a way that is relevant to their friends and family. They understand what’s important to their friends and family, and that’s why when they promote your products, they speak in terms of the benefits associated with owning the products. They use their understanding of what’s important to their friends and family and customize their promotion based on what their friends and family are looking for. And that makes their promotional efforts more effective than yours.

2 – Your current customers are passionate about your company and its products. By human nature, we want to share the things that help us and make us happy. This is especially true when we find a product we love, that makes our lives better. We want to tell others about that product because we want to see others have the same enjoyment from owning the product that we do. When you are in a store considering buying a product and a stranger comes up to you, unprompted, and says “I have that, and I love it!”, it makes an impression on you. Because you realize that they didn’t have to say anything, and did so because they truly do love the product. You’ll likely ask their opinion, which the stranger will happily provide. If you were even slightly considering purchasing the product beforehand, a ringing endorsement from a stranger would probably be enough to convince you to buy it.

3 – Your current customers lower your customer-service costs. As current customers interact with new customers, they are able to answer questions and address complaints head on. They can also speak from the perspective of an owner, and speak to their experiences associated with owning the product being discussed. This can help overcome questions and worries the new customer may have, and can improve the chances that the new customer will become a current one. And this is an obvious cost-savings to your company, as every question that your current customers answer for you, that potentially eliminates an email sent or phone call made to your customer service department.

4 – New customers trust their friends and family more than they do your company. While your current customers know and understand the new customers you want to reach, those new customers also know and trust your current customers. So when a current customer recommends your product to their friends and family, or even to strangers, it carries a lot of weight. Perhaps more importantly, if a new customer is considering your product and a friend tells them NOT to buy it and instead buy a competitor’s product, that new customer will probably listen to their friend.

 

Here’s How You Get More Customers:

1 – When targeting new customers that have no attachment to your brand or knowledge of your products, you sell the benefits associated with the product. These customers aren’t in the market for your product because they aren’t familiar with it. So you sell them on what they gain by owning it. They will understand the benefits and how they are important.

2 – Let your current customers market for you. Your current customers are more trusted by their friends and family. Additionally, your current customers have a better understanding of how to connect with their friends and family than your company does. You should work with your existing customers to give them the tools they need to tell others about your company and its products. Research has found that customers that purchased 5 times from your company also referred 5 new customers, and current customers that had purchased 10 times from your company had referred 7 new customers. Your current customers are literally bringing you new customer at almost no cost to you. This is the type of behavior that you want to encourage.

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Verizon Just Gave Your Business Another Reason to Embrace Mobile

Rural internet access is important to your digital ecommerceI started blogging in 2005, and started consulting companies on their digital marketing strategies in 2006. From 2006-2009 my world changed a lot. I got to work with some of the top brands in the country, and started speaking at top industry events like South By Southwest and Blog World Expo. But while my consulting career was taking off, I was hiding a deep, dark secret.

I only had dial-up internet access. And believe me, trying to load websites and social networks all day on dial-up is just as exciting as it sounds. In 2010 I stepped up to a Mifi card and today have a wifi network that allows me to do any of the work I need to.

The reality is that for many rural areas in the US, dial-up internet access is the only viable option. Cable companies have to run the lines to an area to allow internet access, and when they see only a few dozen people living per square mile in a rural area, well that’s not a lot of potential customers. As a result, rural areas are typically left without access to wired internet connections, and even in 2017, a $9.95 a month NetZero account can often be the most affordable internet access option.

But a very surprising move by Verizon earlier this month to bring back its unlimited plans may change that.

Consider this: In 2013, 9% of rural US residents had one source of internet accesss; Their smartphone. By 2015, that percentage had increased to 15%. With Verizon and AT&T now engaged in a price war, that number could soon increase dramatically. Both Verizon and AT&T are now offering phone lines as low as $45 with unlimited data, talk and text.

As someone that lives in a very rural area and who understands how limited internet access can be in the country, I am thrilled with these announcements. It’s going to mean a lot of people living in rural areas will now have a new option for more affordable, and faster, internet access.

And that also means they will be doing more shopping on their smartphones. Which means it’s more important than ever to make sure your website has a responsive design and can easily handle orders on a mobile device. Over 70% of the United States is considered to be ‘rural’, and in 2015 the percentage of people in these areas that had a smartphone as their only source of internet was 15%. If that trend continues, that percentage will be over 20% in 2017. So that’s a lot of potential customers that you are ignoring if your website doesn’t display correctly on smartphones.

An additional consideration is the more limited retail options available in rural areas. Shoppers in rural areas are hungry for more choices, and will happily buy from retailers that will let them buy online. Also, being in a rural area means being further away from those limited shopping items. If a rural customer wants to buy a new book, does make sense to drive 30 minutes ‘into town’ to buy it from Barnes and Noble, or order it with a couple of clicks on her smartphone with her Amazon app? And with free shipping with Amazon Prime!

The reality is that shoppers are increasingly moving to mobile devices for convenience, and for rural shoppers, it’s often out of necessity. If your website isn’t set up to meet the needs of rural customers, you can best believe your competitor’s website will happily to their mobile business.

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Three Emerging Technologies Will Revolutionize Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Emerging Technologies Impacting Your Digital Marketing Strategy

So many digital marketers focus on understanding every shiny new tool that pops up. And so many CMOs are scared to death of missing out on the next Facebook or Twitter. So every time a new social tool pops up, every marketer rushes there in a sort of cyber land-grab, which often ends up turning into a ghost-town within weeks.

This is why I always say don’t focus on understanding the tools, instead aim to understand how and why people are using the tools. Understanding customer behavior is far more important than understanding tools that may be totally irrelevant in a month. Here’s three emerging technologies that will impact your digital marketing strategies in 2017 and beyond.

 

WiGig – The next generation of Wifi, known as WiGig, promises to greatly widen the internet bandwidth available to devices that access its networks. Theoretically, speeds on WiGig networks could surpass current Wifi by up to 300%. Of course, there will be rollout issues as the market won’t begin to see a plethora of WiGig-capable devices until Summer or Fall of 2017. The good news is that gives you time to plan how this will impact your digital marketing strategy.

WiGig will impact the types of content that customers will consume on their devices. A bigger pipe opens the door to streaming content such as video and more live-streaming from apps such as Periscope. Also, keep in mind that the line between smartphones and tablets is blurring quickly. An iPhone 7 Plus has a viewing screen size of 5.5 inches, whereas the iPad Mini’s screen size is 7.9 inches.

What You Should Do Now:  Start by examining your existing digital marketing strategy and deciding how or if WiGig could impact it. First, WiGig is effectively a bigger pipe for connected devices, especially mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. So a more robust network means you can more easily deliver content that requires more bandwidth, such as video. If you’ve already seen success from your existing content(such as podcasts) being consumed on mobile devices, it could be time to shift to video, as it is going to be huge for digital marketing in 2017.

 

AI (Artificial Intelligence) – One of the more controversial Super Bowl ads of 2017 was a spot for Google Home that accidentally set off customer devices across the country when the commercial aired. While funny (or annoying if you were affected), this is another sign that such digital assistants are becoming more commonplace. Amazon has been experimenting with devices such as Echo for years, and moving forward these devices will continue to improve, and eventually go from being inconsistently weird tech toys to valuable parts of our everyday lives.

Keep in mind that the rise of digital assistants such as Google Home and Amazon Echo means a change in user behavior. If a customer uses their laptop and goes to Google to perform a search, the terms they use will likely be more exact and precise. But if that same customer interacts with a digital assistant they will ‘search’ for the same item, in a different way. Devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home are being marketed as ‘assistants’ moreso than devices, because these companies want customers to be more conversational with the devices. This leads to more conversational search terms.  The user could search for the same thing in slightly different ways based on the device being used.

EX: Search while on laptop: “Best Italian food in San Diego”

Search with Google Home: “Ok Google, what’s the highest-rated Italian restaurant within 3 miles?”

What You Should Do Now: Consider the impact that devices utilizing AI is having on your business now, or could in the future. A good starting point is to get a handle on your existing mobile traffic. What percentage of your search traffic is from mobile devices, and what type of keywords are people using to find your content. If you feel customers will be using digital assistants to search for terms related to your business, then you want to incorporate that into your SEO efforts. As mentioned above, customers use more conversational commands when using digital assistants, and this translates into more conversational search terms being used. As always, a big part of SEO success comes from incorporating user habits into your content creation. The rise of digital assistants is no different.

 

Augmented Reality: Pokemon Go was one of the hottest crazes in 2016, and it introduced many of us to the world of Augmented Reality. AR utilizes a device’s camera to show you objects with additional content overlaid that has relevance to the user. A consumer example could be looking down a downtown street with your camera and having a coupon app that overlays notifications that show which stores currently have sales. A B2B example could be a company utilizing AR with its field technicians when they perform service calls.

For digital marketers, augmented reality offers a way to improve the shopping and research experience for customers, especially on mobile devices. Customers are increasingly using their smartphones to conduct research at the point of purchase that can often decide whether or not a purchase is made. AR apps can provide content that aids in that research phase, and helps close the sale.

What You Should Do Now: As always, the best marketing solves a customer problem. Before you rush off to research creating your own AR app, instead research the customer problems that an AR app could solve. Here’s an example, last year I was shopping for a new car. I would go to car lots and look at the cars by myself, then when I found a few I liked, I would go back and talk to the salesperson about those vehicles. When I found a car I liked, I would pull out my iPhone and bring up reviews and ratings for the car. It would have been much easier if I had an AR app on my phone that would allow me to look at the cars on the lot with my camera, and superimpose the ratings next to each vehicle. This would be a great idea for a car review site like Edmunds or Kelly Blue Book.  It would have solved a problem for me and it would have simplified my research. And it would have made it easy for me to endorse the app to other car shoppers.

In addition to researching AR app options, also consider the type of content that could be delivered via these apps, and the type of customer that will be using them. For example, B2B buyers may want access to more in-depth technical information than a B2C customer would. A B2B customer may want to see the technical manuals, whereas a B2C customer would rather see user reviews. As always, consider the core problems that you will be solving for the customer by leveraging AR.

 

Remember that it’s better to focus first on the macro-influences on your digital marketing efforts, then hone in on the tactics that are only relevant to your strategy. If you have additional questions about how these and other emerging technologies will impact your digital marketing efforts, feel free to leave a comment or email me for a specific answer to your questions.