Infographic: Click-to-Call Commerce

Mobile devices are causing a huge upward trend. And advertisers are noticing.

BIA/Kelsey predicts that the annual number of mobile phone calls to businesses will reach 162 billion by 2019.

That’s great news for companies. Why?

Because consumers spend more than $11 trillion on offline purchases.

Customers normally conduct online research on their mobile devices, and then call businesses to make an offline transaction.

“Marketers are allocating more time to understand how to reach mobile consumers, especially millennials. Our data shows that for many types of purchases, millennials prefer to contact a business directly by phone, and then are following through with purchases,” states John Busby, SVP of Consumer Insights for the Marchex Institute.

A study by Digital Strategy Consulting found that consumers trust ecommerce businesses more when a telephone number is present. An unlisted phone number may discourage shoppers from purchasing products.

Capital One offers their customers the option to call service reps directly from their mobile apps. So, if an individual has questions about an account, he or she can immediately receive help.

Similarly, Redfin, a residential real estate company, gives home buyers the chance to speak to a local agent about specific listings. It’s a convenient solution for customers who need answers immediately.

However, some businesses are missing the click-to-call commerce opportunity.

About 20% of phone calls are abandoned due to poor customer service and sales practices. For example, shoppers may wait 10 minutes on hold or experience trouble with automated telephone systems.

“To really reap the returns from this type of marketing, companies need to take customer connection seriously — customers want staff to genuinely understand their needs. One sign that businesses are beginning to understand this is the migration of U.S. company call centers back in-house,” writes communications consultant Shellie Karabell.

So, how do you improve customer service over the phone? Here are a few ideas to help your team:

1. Eliminate the need for customers to wait on hold

More than half of customers will abandon a call after one minute of waiting on hold. Instead, offer callers the option to receive a call-back.

2. Add a personal touch

Customers expect a personalized shopping experience. If possible, assign a designated representative to handle the buyer’s individualized needs.

3. Give decision makers actionable data

Customer satisfaction is a company-wide responsibility. Using data will help executives adopt new policies or upgrade initiatives to deliver a better customer experience.

This infographic shows us the trends behind click-to-call commerce and the opportunity to increase lead conversions.

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++ Click Image to Enlarge ++Source: Infographic: Click to Call Commerce

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What Google’s Four Ads Above the Fold Mean for Organic Search Results

A few days ago Google announced removing sidebar ads from search results and introducing 4 ads on top of organic results.

While this change has been met with much skepticism and critique by brands which have been working on improving their organic search positions for ages, is it really time for despair?

Definitely no and here are our arguments:

1. More people are likely to scroll down to organic search results now

Let’s face it: Relevancy of paid results is staggering, simply because it’s managed by people bidding on keywords & crafting a copy instead of the algorithm aiming at satisfying the user’s intent.

No wonder, we have developed the habit of scrolling through paid results right to the organic results.

It’s too early to say but the change might mean that more people will just scroll more!

The average U.S. Internet user sees about 50 ads per day, but the bulk of these are not relevant to their search for content or information… Some 60% of survey respondents said they didn’t find traditional ad units relevant

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2. PPC competition is likely to go up; organic competition might go down

Consider that the overall number of ads is now going to go DOWN, with just 4 top ads and 3 at the bottom. 11 total ads on Page 1 now shrinks to 6 or 7. The CPCs are going to rise across the board, particularly for the most competitive commercial queries.

If you’re not a Big Brand, you probably aren’t even going to be able to compete for the top ads based on the bids Google will see now for these terms.

And it’s not just what you’re willing to bid. Quality Scores are going to become even more important (although they were already), as Google is going to want to ensure high CTRs on the Ads, so that means only the really well-oiled and efficient PPC campaigns are going to show up there.

Brands will have to invest more and more into bid optimization software, A/B testing, and entire teams of PPC Specialists who do nothing but paid search. If you’re thinking of just moving most or all efforts to PPC, you better bring your wallet and you better have an experienced PPC team on hand already.

On the other hand, if bigger brands with bigger budgets start shifting effort from organic to PPC, organic competition might go down! The opportunities are likely to increase!

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3. It’s not the first and definitely not the last change to Google SERPs

Google is constantly tinkering with how the SERPs appear, balancing what they think users want and what will generate them revenue.

In fact, they removed the sidebar ads once already in winter of 2012, and the ads were put back. From Knowledge Graph to Carousels to News results and Local Packs, the SERPs have changed more in appearance over the last 3-5 years than they did in the 10 years before that.

We stopped thinking about the SERPs as just “Ten Blue Links” years ago, so why the sudden shift in outlook here? This change is just one of many, and I wouldn’t deviate from long term strategies and marketing plans just because of this one change.

It could get rolled back or replaced at a moment’s notice! Investing in long-term stable rankings has always been the best marketing strategy and it still is!

What are your thoughts?

[Huge thanks to IMN team and especially Daniel O’Leary for help writing this post]

The post What Google’s Four Ads Above the Fold Mean for Organic Search Results appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

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The Pupil Becomes The Master: Five Things Mobile Advertising Can Teach Desktop Marketers

Mobile companies understood mobile-specific strategies long before the widespread adoption of mobile devices and increased adoption of smartphones and tablets. With more than three years of experience and state of the art mobile expertise, there is a lot that can be learnt.

Fred Joseph, COO of S4M, offers some takeaways for planning and executing campaigns for the mobile era:

1. When it comes to creatives, keep it short and catchy

Some brands are used to creating long scenarios as used on desktop (i.e. a 25 second video). However, what we’ve learnt from the mobile user experience is that users have short attention spans. Very short. The shorter and the stronger the message, the more likely a user will be engaged – and bearing in mind that our attention spans have dropped from 12 seconds (in 2000) to 8 seconds (2015) according to a survey conducted last year by Microsoft you really need to make every decisecond count!

Keep things short and sweet and move away from disruptive banner ads that have a tendency to distract users in a negative way rather than enhancing their mobile experience. See a recent example by Adidas here: Adidas ‘Superstar’

Smart marketers need to think more along the lines of immersive augmented app experiences, where they are giving something enhancing to consumers.

For example, this Christmas, S4M’s in-house team created a 3D cube interactive format for mobile devices (the cube is interactive on desktop by clicking and dragging the cube: on mobile it’s tactile) which was used as a holiday greeting for their clients, a format that is only interactive when viewed in a mobile browser.

2. Location is the new cookie

Geo-fencing and geolocation are key to targeting the right individual due to the intimate and individual nature of the smartphone. They allow for a clearer understanding of user behavior by following the entire customer journey. There’s also the benefit of being able to measure mobile investments and mobile store campaigns enable the measurement of direct ROIs. Geolocation can also deliver personalized advertising scenarios and transform ads to a service. For example, presenting a store locator or helping users locate the nearest point of sale can prove an extremely helpful service. There’s no imitating users or delivering irrelevant ads when efficiently dealing with location data.

A great example of this is the Adidas mobile-to-store campaign. The goal of the campaign was to drive sales to Adidas brick and mortar stores, assign a value for mobile in store-conversions and prove that mobile brings incremental value to the business. They pursued this by leveraging location extensions in the search ads, which meant users were directed to the store locator page and thus boost in-store traffic. They then pulled pertinent information from the Adidas retail stores, plus relevant industry data and developed a unique way to report an applied conversion rate. The results proved that mobile ROI brought a 680% incremental increase in ROI and a 20% conversion rate from mobile store locator to in-store visits. For desktop marketers, location is one of the biggest considerations to start making when planning a campaign.

3. The power of now

Users increasingly expect to get what they want in the immediate context and in their exact moment of need. There is a huge battle waging for a customer’s attention and it’s being battled out in ‘mobile moments’ (anytime that a user pulls out their device). The power of immediacy must be harnessed and understood properly by marketers, who need to make sure their customers can get what they want in that precious mobile moment.

A great example of this is played out in how we search. Google processes an average of over 40,000 search queries every second, or 3.5 billion searches per day…or putting it into a wider context that’s a staggering 1.2 trillion searches per year (Google search states here).

This recent post from Think with Google discusses the idea of the “micro-moment” (or mobile moment), the small everyday moments in life that prompt us to search the web with an intention of acting immediately.

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A few examples of micro-moments:

• Your juicer just broke. You need to search to find a new one, or research the best or most economical ones currently available.
• You just watched a news report about the snowfall in New York. You search to find out what you can do to help.
• You see a product you’re thinking about buying in a store. You search to find out if you can get a better price or find a better option.
• Your child wants to play in a park but it’s pouring with rain. You search online to find out where to go.

Each moment where a customer is engaged with their mobile device provides an opportunity to impress or disappoint.

Fail to deliver timely ads and not only do marketers risk losing out on immediate sales but on a longer term they also risk their brand equity and being shut out by consumers irked by invasive messages that would otherwise have been useful had they been properly timed.

4. Cross-channel

When marketers truly understand their customer’s journey they can better adapt the channel mix taking into consideration multiple mobile devices. Companies need to ensure that their marketing departments are set up to effectively orchestrate the cross-channel mix and that the ad can follow the user whatever mobile device they are using (be that a smartphone, tablet, watch or other wearable).

When designing a creative that’s headed cross-channel, check that it works across devices (iOS to android to desktop) and that any calls to action are integrated and flow across the campaign.

For example, when you create a video ad on desktop, it can’t be used on smartphones as it won’t play and deliver the same way. The same applies for smartphones to tablets. This means that not only does a marketing strategy need to be mobile-dedicated, the creatives need to be device-specific too.

Marketers also need to take into consideration the cross-channel operating systems (OS) between iOS devices and Android devices. Never assume that just because a customer has a MacBook that they’re also using an iPhone – increasingly customers make frequent daily journeys between iOS and Android devices so creatives that play out well on both will reach the customer whatever their OS of choice is. The brands that follow this journey with ease will reap rewards.

5. Don’t hide from the mobile world

Desktop marketers need to bear in mind that desktop users are also mobile users. Even if the user started and ended their journey on a desktop, there will likely have been mobile device usage along the way. This doesn’t mean that a desktop strategy will suffice for a mobile advertising campaign, however.

Digital strategy campaigns need to contain a mobile-specific strategy. With the increasing adoption of wearables, mobile devices are not going away; in fact, more are being added to the mix. The brands that are already responding to this explosion are the early adopters who will win the trust of consumers. They will be respected rather than reviled by users as their content will be relevant, useful and timely.

Conclusion

The companies that will excel with marketing strategies that truly reach their customer with the right message, well presented, executed at the right time and in the right context will doubtless win the trust and respect of the consumer while increasing sales and customer retention in a way that is second to none.

Mobile marketers are now adopting strategies that include such a powerful mix of consumer considerations to capture that small “mobile moment” and the desktop marketers who embrace these new power tools will similarly reap rewards. The pupil has certainly become the master!

About the Author: Fred Joseph is the COO of COO of S4M.

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How Community Outreach Can Boost Customer Acquisition & Retention

Strategies for boosting customer retention and fostering customer loyalty abound. But among companies that seek to build, sustain, and grow their customer relationships, few seem to talk about community outreach.

It’s kind of understandable. In a marketing climate that’s increasingly data-driven, it’s sexier for execs in the boardroom to talk about, say, analytics and funnel optimization than about employee volunteer programs and corporate social responsibility. Or: sure, let’s talk about outreach for two minutes — then let’s wrap up this meeting.

This shouldn’t be the case, though. While it may not always seem clear how disaster relief efforts and 3R campaigns would translate to reduced churn and improved retention, community outreach can, in fact, work wonders for your customer relationships.

Outreach improves corporate image and brand reputation

People are less likely to do business with companies that are perceived as irresponsible — according to Cone Communications, 9 in 10 global citizens say they would boycott a company if they learned of irresponsible behavior.

On the other end of the spectrum, companies that are able to visibly demonstrate their ethics and show a commitment to the community are more likely to have a stronger reputation and attract customers who care deeply about what a business stands for.

• In a study by Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business about how outreach can influence consumer attitudes, a grocery retailer experienced a one-unit improvement in customer perception and a 1.8-point increase in share of wallet after it invested in employee fairness and local sourcing as part of its community initiatives.
• Behavioral science researchers found that consumers tend to reward companies with outreach activities by being more loyal to them. Community outreach was even shown to have a stronger effect on customer loyalty than did service quality.
• According to Harvard Law research, community outreach and corporate social responsibility programs create distinct value that leads to increased customer loyalty, willingness to pay premium prices, and lower reputational risks in crisis situations.
• Cone Communications found that 59 percent of Americans are more likely to buy a product associated with a non-profit-corporate partnership. Here’s more data from that study:

  A separate study revealed that 56 percent of US consumers will travel an extra ten minutes out of their way to buy a product associated with a cause they care about.

• A Marketing Science Institute report asserts that, for organizations in B2B environments and supplier-customer relationships, community outreach can foster customers’ trust.

Clearly, community outreach can make a positive impact on your corporate image and brand reputation. It improves how customers perceive the value of your company, which in turn increases their satisfaction and heartens them to stay loyal to your business.

Outreach bolsters your local presence

Whether you’re managing a small business or an enterprise-level organization with multiple locations, community outreach establishes and improves your relevance in local communities where you operate.

Note the success of Small Business Saturday: first held in Roslindale Village, Massachusetts, sponsored by American Express, and organized in partnership with a non-profit (National Trust for Historic Preservation).

The beauty of Small Business Saturday is in its simplicity. Encouraging shoppers to patronize brick-and-mortar businesses, American Express generated an incredible amount of positive coverage and participation on social media and even garnered the support of President Obama.

The campaign also revived local economies in the US and invigorated a customer base of millions of consumers to shop local: on the second year of Small Business Saturday, consumers spent approximately $5.5 billion at local stores and restaurants in lieu of the holiday.

Community outreach doesn’t necessarily have to be about saving the sharks or ending famine in the Horn of Africa. The key is to strategically invest your resources in efforts that help your organization create meaningful connections with customers in the local community. So find a cause that matters to them.

A campaign as simple as allowing neighboring schools to hold fundraising evenings in your stores or developing a localized procurement program amidst gentrification can resonate powerfully with customers, inspiring loyalty and brand advocacy.

Outreach enriches the customer experience

In the Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business cited earlier, customers of the grocery retailer were found to be less enthusiastic about the company’s commitment to environmental friendliness. This attitude wasn’t so much a matter of an active refusal to save the planet; rather, the outreach wasn’t sufficiently tied to anything that directly benefited the customer experience or responded to immediate needs.

Contrast this to a successful program devised by British retailer Tesco, which rewarded shoppers who used reusable bags with loyalty points. By attaching a customer experience benefit (savings) to its outreach, Tesco not only attracted consumers who shared the same values; it also added a kind of affinity and reward component that, in the eyes of people looking for a place to shop, distinguished the company from the competition.

Who knew these could make such a difference for a company?

Whole Foods Market has a similar reusable bag program. If a customer uses a reusable bag, they have the choice of getting 10 cents off per bag or giving that 10 cents to a charity.

It could be that you’re managing a luxury development brand whose beach resort locations attract divers, in which case a coastal cleanup sends a better message than organic agriculture. Or you could be managing multiple casino properties, in which case consumer trust can more effectively be earned with a responsible gaming program than, say, carbon offsetting schemes.

In terms of boosting customer retention, it is important to tailor your community outreach efforts in ways that enrich the customer experience. Listen to customer feedback and analyze your data: these are excellent starting points for identifying relevant causes and customer experience opportunities. The more beneficial the causes are for your customers, the greater the impact community outreach will have on customer retention.

Outreach makes your brand less vulnerable on social

It can go wrong so quickly for organizations that experience communications crises or ethical lapses, especially when these come to light on social media. When customers leave, and leave because they believe you did a Bad Thing, it’s not easy to win them back.

Remember “United Breaks Guitars”?

In one fell swoop, a three-minute song on YouTube turned an unresolved customer issue into a national embarrassment for United Airlines, prompting a Harvard Business School professor to write:

“In social media, an entity’s size and brand recognition make it more vulnerable to parody and attack, not safer.”

Community outreach minimizes that vulnerability. It provides a measure of insurance against any negative issues or customer experiences affecting your brand reputation — while also amplifying positive messages and emotions involving your organization’s ability to do good and right things.

Outreach enhances stakeholder value

A number of studies have explored the relationship between improved customer retention and increased stakeholder value. It certainly makes sense that satisfied, loyal customers can result in better market performance, a more stable customer base and reliable source of future revenue, and a more valuable company.

But it can be the other way around, too: stakeholder value serving to reduce defections and keep customers. Stakeholder value enhances a company’s investment prospects; these investments can then be focused to more effectively develop the business’ customer relationships.

This is where community outreach comes into play: it enables better access to funding and makes it more attractive for investors to commit capital to a business that sets high social and ethical standards. (Some even invest exclusively in organizations with a proven track record in community outreach — think sustainable supply chains, say, or adherence to labor or performance standards.)

• A Journal of Business Ethics study found that, following relief efforts for the deadly 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, market reaction was generally positive for companies that donated, with larger donations yielding greater increases in return.

And it’s not just the investors, either: employees of companies that are highly engaged in the community are more likely to stay, perform well, and make a positive contribution to the satisfaction and loyalty of customers.

• According to a University of Bath study, corporate social responsibility and community outreach improved employee perceptions of and commitment to their companies.
• Rutgers University found that employees who were able to participate in community, social, or environmental outreach while on the job were more satisfied with their jobs by a ratio of 2 to 1.

It’s clear that community outreach galvanizes external and internal stakeholders, acting as a powerful value creation platform. And the effect of such a platform does not go unnoticed by customers, who will certainly be drawn to companies that achieve strong market performance as well as to businesses with engaged, happy employees.

Community outreach as an executive decision

Community outreach typically involves giving your company’s resources — be these in the form of money, time, products and services, volunteer hours — to the local community in which you operate. But it’s not an exclusively philanthropic construct; it is also one of the most effective strategies for boosting customer retention and driving the growth of your organization.

Make commitment to community outreach an executive decision. Don’t treat it as an afterthought or leave it out of the discussion in your next meeting. How your business works and engages with the community will change the way the community does business with you.

About the Author: Chris Campbell is the CEO of ReviewTrackers, a review management and customer feedback platform designed to help companies efficiently monitor online reviews, manage brand reputation, and enhance the customer experience in ways that make a positive impact on the bottom line.

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5 Rules for Using Video on Landing Pages – and Examples of How to Bend Them

Bending and stretching is great. Not just for your body (who doesn’t want a Jennifer Aniston-like yoga-toned body?!), but for your creative and effective marketing efforts. Here’s what I mean: You know that video is an incredibly engaging and converting medium. You use it on your website, campaign emails, and you probably know it’s great for landing pages too; after all, video on landing pages can increase conversion by over 80%! And of course there are guidelines and best practices, like putting the video above the fold, keeping your video short, choosing an engaging thumbnail, and of course, including a CTA in the video to drive conversion (for details and more best practices, check out this post). But sometimes, rules are meant to be, well, bent. That’s how you can get a fresh perspective, and give your audience a fresh experience.

Want to see what I mean? Let’s check out a few different examples to help inspire you.

Example 1: Use a good thumbnail…but what’s a good thumbnail?

As I’ve said before, videos have to be tempting enough to be clicked on, so a thumbnail is your first big step to engaging and converting your audience. What do you think of when you think of a thumbnail? A static image from your video with a big play button overlaid (if you go this route, don’t forget to A/B test your thumbnails to see which image works best with your audience)? A thumbnail doesn’t have to be what you would expect.

Check out this creative landing page—the ‘thumbnail’ is a looping video that immediately helps engage your audience and draws them into the story.

Example 2: Put a video above the fold…but no one said there couldn’t be more videos below the fold!

You know your most engaging content should be placed above the fold of your landing page. Typically that means your video should be front and center, tempting people to click, be engaged, and convert. It’s also true that landing pages are generally meant for simple messaging and simple design so you don’t overwhelm your audience or confuse them. But that doesn’t mean that you can have only one video on a landing page! Yes, you should have one “hero” video consisting of your most important message, but you can further the experience and deepen the understanding of your message by providing even more videos throughout the rest of the page.

Want to see what I mean? Check out this page for Saleforce’s Dreamforce conference. The hero ‘highlights’ video gives the viewer a taste of everything the conference has to offer, and once the viewer is enticed by the content and interested in the conference, they can further explore more video below that offers a deeper look into past conference sessions.

Example 3: Keep your video meaty enough to be valuable for your whole audience…but specific enough to be valuable for one viewer

Is your face like “Whaaa??” right now? Let me explain. No one likes wasting even a few minutes of their day on filler content that doesn’t teach them anything or make their day better or easier. So it’s important to make sure your video’s content is meaty enough to back up, explain, or give more detail about your landing page’s key message. You want to make sure it’s useful enough content for everyone who lands on the page.

But you know what else it could be? The video on your landing page could be directed to one viewer only. Take a look at this event landing page video to see what I mean. Is there a more engaging experience than that? Personalized Video is a stunning way to build trust, enhance your credibility, and more easily convert your viewer because they feel like you’re talking directly to them and no one else.

Example 4: Video is a powerful experience—but it doesn’t need to be a standalone experience

Okay so by now you might be totally sold that video is the way to go for every message, every audience, every content type, etc, etc. Good for you for embracing video…but that doesn’t mean it has to be the only experience your audience gets. Some might want to read a bit, some might want to watch video, and some might like to do both. Keep that in mind when you’re creating your landing pages. This way you can offer an experience that appeals to all sorts of audiences. For example, if your video consists of vital information, put that information in text format nearby on the page as well. Or, if your video is simply meant to be a creative and fun way to introduce your content, you should still make sure the concept or theme of the video is carried consistently throughout the text on the page.

Want to see what I mean? Well with this landing page, if the text didn’t include a tie-in to the creative concept, then the background video would feel very random and out of place—page visitors might wonder why someone is crying in the looping video.

Now, in this example, the text is tied right into the video, so you can listen to it, enjoy the motion, feel swept away in the story, and also read along!

Example 5: Size your video so it gets noticed…but that doesn’t mean it has to scream and demand attention

If you’re going to use video on a landing page, you probably want it it stand out and get noticed. But that doesn’t mean every video on the page should fill up the whole screen, and drown out all other content. Size each video appropriately for the value it offers the audience.

Want to know what I mean? Look at this landing page for Space Camp, the video marketing summit. The page offers visitors a taste of what the summit is all about. The first video on the page is the hero video, pumping up last year’s attendees and future attendees with highlights (including ‘meaty’ comments and reviews) of last year’s incredible event. And for those who want to know more about the event (perhaps they didn’t make it to last year’s summit), they can scroll down the page, check out the “About” section, and then, if they want to experience even more, they can view the smaller, subtler video in the About section.

Feeling bendy now? Hopefully those examples will inspire you to use video on your own landing pages in creative and new twists on tried-and-true standards. Your audiences already love video, and they’ll love the fresh experience you can offer! (Still wanting to bend something? There’s probably a yoga class about to start nearby…)

The post 5 Rules for Using Video on Landing Pages – and Examples of How to Bend Them appeared first on Vidyard.

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The Dangerous Data Leak That Is Costing Marketers Their Jobs (And How to Fix It)

“Why did we hire you?”

This is one of the last questions a marketer wants to hear from their boss.

If they have to ask what contributions you’re making to the company, then you may want to prepare yourself for a summons to their office and an invitation to “shut the door.”

The ability to prove marketing value is important for job security — And it’s even more critical for campaign optimization.

But we can’t do this if we are unable to properly attribute the leads that our campaigns are generating.

So, how do we take credit for all of the leads that we are bringing in, increase ROI and demonstrate marketing value?

The Lead Source That You Can’t Afford to Overlook

Most marketers can get pretty fanatical about monitoring their web analytics data.

They want to know exactly how visitors are interacting with their websites, the path that led them to their destination and the power to zero in on any weak points in their conversion funnels.

Clicks are important – But what about phone calls?

• According to BIA/Kelsey, phone calls are considered to be the most valuable lead source by 86% of business.
• 70% of mobile searchers call businesses directly from search results.
• And approximately 29% of phone calls result in a conversion.

These stats represent a major opportunity for marketers, and highlight the need for more data around these types leads.

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If you aren’t tracking phone calls then you are basing your strategy on incomplete data AND failing to take credit for all the leads your campaigns are driving.

Phone calls as a lead source are something that the modern marketer can no longer ignore — especially when you consider the breakneck rise of mobile search.

Mobile Search = More Calls

The device in every prospect’s pocket has changed their search behavior, intent and expectations.

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Smartphones have not only transformed the way consumers access their information, they have also impacted the way that they connect with businesses. Mobile search has a much higher likelihood of triggering users to take action and this action is usually a phone call.

Declarations of an upcoming ‘mobile explosion’ have been trumpeted for years. Well, we can all stop holding our breath. It’s already happened.

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• Last year, mobile searches surpassed their desktop counterparts for the first time.
• Annual calls to businesses from smartphones are projected to hit 162 billion by 2019 — compared to 77 billion in 2014.
• According to a report from eMarketer, 85.9% of digital ad search dollars will go toward mobile by 2018.
• New ad formats, such as call-only AdWords campaigns, are being tailored to meet the growing business demands associated with mobile consumers.

If you want to take advantage of this trend, it’s critical to understand how mobile drives conversions. Follow-up actions on mobile devices have a tendency to happen very quickly. In fact, 55% of conversions (store visit, phone call or purchase) take place within an hour.

The nature of phone calls also present a different type of prospect and a unique engagement opportunity. A caller is someone that needs his or her questions answered and the immediacy of a phone call provides significantly higher conversion potential.

Calls often have a larger revenue value and involve big purchase decisions.

In order to accurately monitor and extract the value from this leads source, marketers need in-depth call data that can compete with their web analytics metrics.

Stemming The Flow of Leaking Data

Every lead needs to be correctly attributed to its source.

And if you want to prove marketing value, then you need to add phone calls to the equation. Failing to track the calls that your marketing is generating makes it impossible to optimize campaign performance and marketing spend.

By including call data, you can get a complete picture of your campaign results. This data can be used to distinguish the campaigns that are producing results from those that are not.

When you combine this information with the reports you are pulling from your web analytics platform you will finally have the data you need to modernize your marketing process.

So, what types of tools can be used to take advantage of calls as a lead source?

• Call Tracking: On a basic level, call tracking allows marketers to identify the precise ads, channels and marketing activities that are generating phone calls.
• Call Analytics: This speech recognition technology provides insight into the actual sales conversation, which can be used to assess lead quality, track conversions, evaluate sales performance and more.
• Bid Management: This software can be integrated with your call tracking and analytics platform to automatically adjust your bids to get the highest return from your ads.
• Marketing Automation: Your call data will not provide much value if you don’t follow it up with action. If you truly want to optimize your call marketing performance then you may want to explore the possibilities offered by automation tools.

When you can associate specific marketing strategies to leads and profit then you can focus your budget on the most rewarding channels and experience an immediate lift in ROI.

And the results are even more pronounced when you can see what takes place after the phone rings.

Moving Beyond the Size of Your Lead Pool

Even when you have the insight provided by both web and call data, you are still in danger of being fooled by the numbers.

As marketers assess their campaign performance, many of them are so focused on the numbers that they forget to dig into the quality of their leads.

Let’s say that you are running two different campaigns and you are at the point where you want to evaluate their performance. Campaign A has generated 38 phone calls and Campaign B has produced 66 calls. With only this data, it would appear as if Campaign B is the clear winner.

But once you actually examined the metrics from the content of the phone calls, you would see that although Campaign B generated more phone calls it resulted in fewer qualified sales opportunities and conversions.

The ability to delve into call conversations used to be dependent on human call scoring, but the development of call analytics technology has made it possible to access key metrics from calls in near real time.

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Instead of being forced to rely on weak call quality indicators, such as duration, marketers can now base their decisions on deep call data. With call analytics you can extract metrics like lead score, sales readiness, commitment to buy, appointments set and missed opportunities just to name a few.

Call tracking gives you the ability to track ALL of the leads produced by your campaigns. And with the addition of call analytics, you can also analyze the quality of these phone leads and even automate actions based on call content.

Your marketing is probably working better than you think it is. Get the data you need to prove it.

About the Author: Shemmah Al-Darweesh is the Content Marketing Specialist at Convirza, the first call marketing optimization platform. You can read more of her work on the Convirza blog or by connecting with her on LinkedIn.

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Podcast: Getting Personal with Video in an Impersonal World

The B2B Nation Podcast is made up of expert opinions and advice on the most important topics in B2B sales and marketing today. Recently, Jeff Gadway, the Director of Product Marketing at Vidyard, was a guest on our podcast.

In this episode, we discuss where the need for personalized video content arises, why it is important for marketers, whether marketers are underutilizing video for lead generation, MarketingSherpa Summit, and more!

Below are my key takeaways from the conversation.

Personalized video allows you to engage your audience on a one-to-one level, but at mass scale.

If you think about it, the sound of a person’s name is the sweetest word in the human language. It was Dale Carnegie who said that a long time ago. We all want to be treated as individuals. We want to be identified, respected, acknowledged as individuals, and personalized video allows you to talk to somebody on a one-to-one level, but at a scale of 10s or 1000s in one mass email campaign. It allows you to go very broad but also get really targeted and treat people as people. As Jeff explained, “We recognize people as individuals, and we’re seeing some amazing results that indicate that this is in fact working, and that it’s making a huge impact on the effectiveness of email campaigns.”

There are a number of different places that personalized video can be used.

Outbound email campaigns are definitely a great place to start. Including a video thumbnail in an email campaign increases click-through rates by 2x. When you add a personalized element, including the recipient’s name or company name or job title in that personalized thumbnail image in the email itself, the click-through rates skyrocket through the roof. That’s one of the simplest ways to implement a personalized video. You can also use it for inbound campaigns as well.

Get the Guide

7 Ways to Create Hyper-Personalized Marketing Experiences with Video

Get the Guide

You can put a personalized video on a campaign landing page, so when a person arrives on that landing page, they might fill in some information and then be sent a personalized video as a follow-up. Jeff shared, “We’ve seen customers that are using personalized video to do product demos for recruiting purposes. We’ve even got a couple of customers that are in the education space that are using it to recruit high-potential students that they’re looking to bring to their university.”

The results that Vidyard’s customers are seeing are really phenomenal.

“We recently worked with a number of customers on some holiday campaigns back in December, and we got them to share some of their results with us. Tradeshift is one of the customers we’ve been working with. What they shared is that their click-through rates are typically around 1% on their email campaigns, which is pretty average for marketers today. When they ran this personalized video campaign, they saw their click-through rates sky rocket to over 10.75% which is a pretty phenomenal increase in click-through. We saw Cetera Financial see similar types of increases, 600% increases in their click-through rates.”

Act-On saw 30% more people watching personalized videos right until the end.

“Typically speaking, just under 50% of viewers of Act-On’s videos would watch all the way to the end, and with personalized video, that number increased to approximately 80%. What we’re seeing typically is increases in click-through rates, increases in click-to-open rates, longer time spent on page, longer engagement with the videos themselves, and more downloads … in addition to fewer unsubscribes than people are typically used to.”

What marketers are saying about video and what marketers are actually doing about video, are two very different things.

About 75% of marketers would say that video is the most important content medium that they have. However, only about 15% of them are actually capturing actionable data about their viewers that they can use to score leads, segment customers, build more effective nurture programs and do things that would allow them to demonstrate the value of their video strategy and show the ROI on their video.

“Marketers definitely are under-utilizing video; not that they don’t understand that video is a powerful medium. They get that it allows them to capture the minds and hearts of their audience, but they don’t have the tools to be able to actually translate those views into actionable insights that allow them to move their business forward, generate revenue, and show results.”

—

This podcast was created and published by TechnologyAdvice, an Inc. 5000 company looking to help buyers find marketing automation software, CRM systems, and more.

 

The post Podcast: Getting Personal with Video in an Impersonal World appeared first on Vidyard.

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The Non-Artist’s Guide To Storyboarding Marketing Videos

We’ve all been there before.

You’ve got a great idea.  This lead gen video is going to be the next Dropbox success story.

You talk to your video team.  You write the script.  Everyone is excited.  You shoot the video.  World-domination, an IPO and/or a promotion are mere frames away.  You launch the video.  That upload click has never felt so good.

…

Then the crickets start.  And when you watch the video you realize… “this is nothing like what I had in mind!!”

What gives?

Shoulda made a storyboard.

Some people think a storyboard has got to be a Pixar-level work of art in and of itself.  Or that you’ve got to be able to draw or be creative to make a good storyboard.  That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Here’s a simple process we use to make storyboards so there’s less of a chance of botching production.

It’s Got To Start As An Outline

Storyboards (unfortunately) aren’t magic.  If you don’t know what you’re going to say, there’s no saving it.

There are a few common outlines you can use to get started.  Here are two every video marketer should have in their tool belt:

1. Hero’s Journey

Here’s a link to a free Google Doc template that spells this out.

Stories from Star Wars to Dropbox’s legendary explainer have harnessed this framework to make high-growth videos.

It goes like this:

1. Meet the Hero, Bob.
2. Bob has got a problem.
3. He tried this, that, and the other thing and they didn’t work.
4. Then he found the solution which works like this __________.
5. Bob got this sweet, positively emotional pay-off + call to action.

2. Problem, Agitate, Solve

Check out this link for the Google Doc template

Cheesy infomercials have made BILLIONS with this framework.

The idea is when there’s a pressing problem you don’t want to let up on the pain, but keep pressing forward so it’s clear how much they need your solution.

Here’s a breakdown:

1. Do you have this problem?
2. Here are the things making your problem worse.
3. This solution focuses explicitly on your big problem.
4. Customer testimonials or proof.
5. Benefit recap and call to action.

Choose Your Software

My software of choice is Google Presentation.  One because it’s free, but two because it’s familiar and has almost zero roadblocks to getting started.

If you’ve got some paper, a cell phone camera/scanner and a Google account you’re ready to go.

Here’s a helpful, free slide template you can use. Or if you like to do the pencil-to-paper method, here are a few printable word docs.

If you’re looking to get a bit more fancy you can take a look at StoryboardThat.

Highlight Your Critical Frames

Inside a two minute video you may not have a ton of scenes, but there will always be a few critical frames.

Every marketing storyboard should have frames for:

1. Opener
2. Problem Statement
3. How the Solution works ← Often the most critical to storyboard.
4. Call to action ← This is a close second in terms of storyboard need.

Frame 1 – The Opener

The main goal in the first frame is to create a sense of mystery.  If you’re working on a lead gen video, this is doubly important since a visitor is normally trading their contact info to scratch the itch of their curiosity.

Frame 2 – Problem Statement

This is the frame that should get your viewer’s head nodding (or qualify out the ones who shouldn’t be watching anyway).  If you have any dark or depressing frames, this is where they’ll go.

Frame 3 – How Your Solution Works

My favorite frame of all.  This is where your marketing chops come into play.  You can shave major time off an explanation with a well-thought-out solution frame.  Binge watch the explanation section of some late night infomercials to see this one done exceptionally well.

Frame 4 – Call To Action

Without this you might as well go home.  This is a nitty gritty frame, with the most important factor being clarity.  Is your URL easy to read?  Did viewers see where to click?  Does your info stay on screen long enough?

One important note: some frames are important to script well but don’t really need their own storyboard.  For example, benefit statements are critical to a script, but as long as your wording is right, your imagery may not be as essential.

Doodle Your Frames

Nearly every video I make starts as a doodle.  Ironically, I can’t draw but it doesn’t take complicated images to get the idea across.  My go-to images?  Stick figures for people, and labeled rectangles for objects.

Some of the keys you’re going for are:

• Positioning.  Show the artist or videographer how the scene needs to be setup.
• Timing.  Get across how the audio is going to be timed against the visual.
• Transitions.  How much info is too much in your scenes?  When should you cut?  Pay attention to how your scenes are flowing into each other or if it feels like they’re not changing for a long period of time.

Do A Dry Run

The main value of storyboards is being able to run through your script and feel how your video is going to go BEFORE you’ve spent the time and money on production.

So fire up your script, pull out your key frames and do a dry run.  This is the step where the heaviest tweaking and revisions will come in and by doing it at the storyboard stage you’ll be saving yourself time and money.

John Lasseter, Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer puts it well.

“I will never let something go into production unless it is working fantastic in that version with the still drawings. Because no matter all the great animation you can do will never save a bad story. We will work and rework and rework and rework these reels — sometimes thirty times before we let it go into production.”

Go Forth And Storyboard!

While it seems like a little more work upfront, dropping in a storyboard step can save major time in production.  

If you have any tips of your own, please share them below!

The post The Non-Artist’s Guide To Storyboarding Marketing Videos appeared first on Vidyard.

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3 Shortcuts to Double Customer Acquisition in Record Time

In school they teach you marketing from 30,000 feet, as if you have a brand everyone adores and plenty of cash in the bank to throw at a well rounded ‘media mix’ that magically makes numbers soar.

“Marketing is sooooo easy”, you think (already incorrectly equating marketing with advertising).

Cue champagne. Hot office parties complete with kegs and heavy petting. Kinda like The Wolf of Wall Street. Well, the fun parts at least.

Then you get a job. Or start a company. And reality hits.

Teams are stretched paper thin. Everything’s expected ASAP. Budgets are nonexistent.

The good news, is that with some ingenuity and good old-fashioned hustle, you can scale customer acquisition despite – and often because of – your limited internal resources.

Here’s how, along with a few tips for each scenario to implement immediately.

How ‘Constraints’ Can Actually Help You Scale Customer Acquisition

Significant growth comes down to big wins that deliver outsized returns. That means you generally have 2-3 channels or tactics driving the bulk of your traffic and conversions.

Contrary to the financial world, diversification will kill a small organization trying to aggressively grow. You can’t compete on multiple fronts with your puny budget or tiny team. Instead, you need to get scrappy and throw everything you’ve got in one direction – all at the same time – in a single coordinated effort.

You do that by doubling down on one approach, avoiding all the time-sucking distractions along the way that prevent you from executing properly.

Counterintuitively, your existing internal constraints can help. Tough decisions become blindingly obvious when you’re drastically short in specific resources. Typically that comes in the form of time, labor, or money.

• Time: You need results – fast! Priority number one is moving the needle, as fast as possible, by doing whatever it takes.
• Labor: You’re short on bodies, but as a result have a little extra cash and can afford to invest in long-term solutions (because realistically you can’t deliver results tomorrow).
• Money: You’re cash-strapped, or on a short runway, and can’t afford to splash on flashy trade show booths or ad campaigns.

The good news is that you can use this constraint to your advantage, by helping you figure out which route to take and focus on.

Constraint #1. Time

Maybe you have a board meeting in 6 months and need to show traction.

Or maybe your runway is disappearing faster than the horizon on a hot summer day. (That was the most poetic thing I’ve ever written.)

People short on time have one option. And only one option. Advertising.

Most small or inexperienced organizations incorrectly assume that advertising is a waste of precious capital. But you’d be surprised if you had proper tracking in place to compare your advertising results (which is a flexible, variable cost) with astronomically expensive overhead costs like payroll (which are rigid, fixed costs).

Basic time tracking can help, and Toggl is a great, simple option. The problem, of course, is getting everyone to actually use it. And then having to manually cross-reference results.

Time Doctor is a perfect option to avoid this, because it runs automatically in the background while people work. It can help you keep track of where time might be slipping away, which activities are the most distracting or tedious, while also highlighting new ways to optimize performance of remote teams.

When you actually compare the data, you’ll see that advertising can present a more affordable option for scaling growth, on a cadence that’s difficult to match.

Tip #1. Paid Acquisition

Paid acquisition is the ONLY option that has the power to deliver instant, consistent results. You spend $100, bring in $120, and continue reinvesting that original amount.

The most popular options for this ‘direct-response’ style include AdWords, Facebook or LinkedIn. But don’t hesitate to try new platforms which typically have less competition, meaning your starting budget can be less too. For example, this in-depth (and visual – yay pictures!) guide on Instagram ad best practices is incredibly useful. You can even do media buying on a broader, yet affordable scale through an independent network like BuySellAds.com.

But before spending a single dime, you need to figure out an expected budget. I like to walk clients through a simple ad model (below), showcase how you can iterate based on early results while starting a paid campaign for the first time.

Tip #2. Retarget Everyone

Try not to waste a single visit by retargeting ads to previous site visitors. That means everyone that hits your site will see something for a few days (or weeks) after that might just get them to return and take action. (Retargeting also tends to be pretty affordable because of how targeted your audience becomes.)

AdWords remarketing is fairly straightforward, allowing you to run campaigns based on a list of users, people who’ve visited specific parts of your site, or visitors who complete some type of transaction goal.

Facebook also provides some really interesting options because of the ability to use custom audiences. For example, you can get a little more sophisticated and target people by ‘buying cycle’ stage. Here’s a guide on optimizing your Facebook sales funnel by using different types of ads for people in each stage.

Tip #3. Optimize Your Funnel

While most of the attention has been focused on advertising so far, it’s critical that your lead gen funnel – the place your traffic is going – has been optimized properly as well.

That means your ‘message match’ is perfect. Landing pages are optimized for best practices. You’re testing… something. And marketing automation is tied together so that every single lead receives the right message at the right time.

Breaking down a larger transaction into a series of ‘micro-conversions’, and then measuring each, can help you spot the problem areas where breakdowns occur.

Constraint #2. Labor

Most organizations have small marketing teams. Or they’re ill-equipped with great ‘brand’ people, but not many ‘performance’ or ‘growth’-oriented ones. Your ‘team’ might even just be you and a buddy.

Regardless, it’s tough to get important things accomplished when you’re having to juggle multiple tasks, wear different hats, or other corny metaphors for multitasking.

Realistically that means (a) results won’t come overnight, and (b) your best growth strategy needs to emphasize scale.

Advertising (previously mentioned) is a decent potential option, because it scales very effectively without a ton of involvement from people (assuming everything’s up-and-running, and you’re just tweaking here and there).

However, the best scaling tactic is organic search (or SEO). Today’s SEO involves all facets of inbound marketing, from content creation to promotion, that means a single investment of time and effort provides compounding results.

New blog posts create fodder for social and email. Those social and email campaigns help drive PR. Those PR referrals help drive new editorial links back to the original content, which now achieves greater search visibility – repeating the process to infinite with new links, traffic, leads and customers.

Cue the God light and angels softly strumming harps.

So where to start with organic search?

Tip #1. Clean Up Crawl Errors ASAP

All of the links in the world won’t help if your site’s riddled with 404 errors and duplicate content. Fire up Screaming Frog or use Moz to help you spot all of these inconsistencies and get them cleaned up ASAP.

Search engines have also started factoring in usage data like site traffic and engagement metrics (think bounce rates, time on site, and more). Sites with more traffic and better engagement rates tend to see better rankings too.

Login to Google Analytics, find the landing pages with the most visits AND highest bounce rate, and start addressing those first.

Tip #2. Create Unbranded Content

Everyone knows ‘content is important’. Every two-bit, social media hack journalist has said it over the past few years.

But what they neglect to mention is that there are over 2 million posts published each day. Mediocrity, therefore, is a waste of time (and effort). If you only have the resources to do ONE awesome guide or resource, do that, and promote the hell out of it.

This should be ‘unbranded content’, primarily focused on audience pain points, and entertaining to some degree. Perhaps no company has done more with less, than PayScale who regularly pumps out interesting resources that get featured by Mashable and other huge media sites.

Tip #3. ‘Spy’ on Your Competition

Last but not least, use a tool like Open Site Explorer to ‘spy’ on the competition.

The point isn’t to copy the competition. It’s to reverse-engineer.

HOW are they getting those links? What’s the broader strategy, or specific campaigns they’re running? And how can you take a similar approach, but leverage your strengths to 10x the quality?

For example, the Hard Rock San Diego has run holiday promotions and been featured in these publications in the past. Now how can you extrapolate that for next year’s promotion and outreach?

Constraint #3. Money

Everyone’s tight on money. But if you’re ESPECIALLY strapped, you should leverage child labor and elbow grease.

Specifically, you need to hunt down and develop as many partnerships as possible. And as these will take a bit of time to develop organically, you’ll need to have realistic expectations to know they won’t payoff tomorrow or next week. But the future payoff years from now will be astronomical if done properly.

In each case, you’re looking for existing audiences or communities of like-minded people (whether that’s potential customers or partners), and doing your best to expose yourself to them. (Maybe I should re-phrase that last part?)

Hope you’re ready to hustle.

Tip #1. Cross Promotion

Cross-promotions are boring, tired, and… effective if done correctly.

The trick is to find complementary businesses, who aren’t obviously competitive, but target similar customer segments with similar value propositions.

That means a law firm might be the perfect partner for an accountant if you’re looking for high net worth people who invest in real estate. Except, you know, then you have to deal with boring lawyers who just talk about boring cases all day.

Start by researching local associations to find a list of members, or upcoming events you might be able to attend (more on that in a second). You can also try LinkedIn, using the prospecting list features to get updates on potential partners to reach out to.

Tip #2. Targeted Outreach

The best use of social media is to assist broader PR efforts, not just sit around wasting hours in a Twitter chat.

Instead, you can use it to find, research and contact journalists or bloggers who might be interested in what you have to say. The broader goal here isn’t one-to-one communication, but one-to-many (with help from the people who can put you in front of huge audiences).

PR agencies are paid for access to their list of journalists and bloggers. But you can manually build your own by outsourcing to Upwork (or similar) at a tiny fraction of the cost (remember that whole Toggl and Time Doctor discussion?).

You can also use a tool like Followerwonk, which is like Google Analytics for Twitter, to get a list of socially active bloggers to collaborate on promotions.

Tip #3. Events & Networking

If the goal is to piggyback on these larger communities to gain access to customers or other potential partners, don’t just attend events. Get involved.

Help them set up and take down. Try to speak, host, or sit on a panel. Volunteer for behind-the-scenes meetings or contribute your expertise on particular topics. Whatever it takes to get an in-road, and thus more leverage or influence within that community.

One clever approach by Hakka Labs involved them recording audio sessions from various dev-focused meetups and then providing it as a helpful podcast to all the attendees for free. In exchange, group organizers were more than happy to help promote this link and resource to their audience.

Conclusion

The best way to grow significantly is through doubling down on big wins.

Surprisingly, embracing your constraints can help by focusing the limited resources you do have in a single direction.

The good news is that all of these tactics listed here have a single thing in common… they’re all insanely simple. There’s no clever ‘growth hacking’ techniques required.

That’s because the most difficult thing to do properly, is execute.

Complexity often means things take longer, require more people, and cost more.

While keeping it simple (stupid) is the easiest way to prioritize results over theory.

About the Author: Brad Smith is a founding partner at Codeless Interactive, a digital agency specializing in creating personalized customer experiences. Brad’s blog also features more marketing thoughts, opinions and the occasional insight.

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