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11 Apr, 2014

How Being Data Driven Helps in Your Content Marketing Efforts

Content marketing is the preferred mode of marketing for many businesses these days. Not only is it very cost-effective when compared to traditional forms of marketing, but also allows brands to use the power of the Internet to increase their market base. Moreover, content marketing, unlike many other forms of online marketing, is still considered trustworthy by consumers leading to brands making a beeline towards content marketing firms.

However, many brands are unable to use content marketing effectively, as they don’t know how their campaigns are faring or why and what they must change. This is why brands need to practice data-driven content marketing and not just content marketing.

Track the performance of your content marketing efforts

There is no point in having marketing campaigns if you have no idea how well they are performing. Yes, content marketing campaigns are much cheaper than traditional marketing campaigns but that doesn’t mean you can run them forever even when they are not giving you any results. This is a rookie mistake in content marketing and unfortunately it is committed by many brands. They create and launch content marketing campaigns without checking up on them.

Without tracking any data and without any metrics analysis, they may have no idea if their content marketing campaigns are meeting targets and goals set for them. Without using data analytics to track content marketing, there is no way to know if the content marketing efforts of a brand are actually worth the investment, time, and effort that has gone into the campaign.

Is your content reaching the intended audience?

Brands turn to content marketing to help them reach out to and attract their ideal or target audience. Once brands figure out the kind of people or the demographics that they think will benefit from their products and services, they try and create content and marketing campaigns to gain visibility among their ideal audience. Smart brands and content marketers use data analytics methods to track their content marketing campaigns to see if they are actually reaching out to the intended people or not.

With data analytics, you can actually figure out how people are interacting as well as reacting with your content and marketing campaigns. This will allow you to understand what you are doing right and the areas that you can improve upon. With proper data analytics processes, you will be able to change your content marketing campaigns to make them more effective.

Content marketing is also one of the most important ways to attract more prospects. Choosing prospects is very tricky, as they need to be in tune with your brand. They must also understand your business and marketing philosophies to be truly beneficial to your brand. If you are not using a data-driven approach to content marketing, how can you find out if your brand is attracting the right kind of prospects that will actually help your brand and not harm it? Moreover, the content marketing landscape and consumer tastes are ever changing and your campaigns need to adapt to them as quickly as possible. With no data analytics, you will never know when the changes occur and how they are affecting your campaigns.

You can improve your content marketing campaigns

Apart from getting the ideal prospects and consumers for your brand, content marketing also helps brands improve their visibility. Another, and probably the ultimate goal of content marketing, is to increase sales for the company. This is the ultimate and long-term goal of any marketing campaign. Data from tracking campaigns and analysis of this collected data can help you understand if casual visitors are being converted into customers and if not, then what is blocking the sales funnel.

With the right data you can improve your campaigns to convert casual readers of your content into paying customers without having to blatantly express that you want them to buy your products. Data analytics can also give you the entire and detailed view of the purchasing or conversion funnel to see how much time it takes for visitors to convert and at what phases they are spending the most time. This will help you understand what is stopping people from converting and how you can change your content marketing campaigns to nudge causal visitors in the right direction.

Jessica Davis

2595

26 Dec, 2013

6 Online Tools and Tips for Marketing Small Businesses

Stay In Contact With Your Customers Via Email

Sending regular emails to customers is a simple and efficient way to keep customers informed about promotions and build brand loyalty. According to MarketingProfs, 65% of americans claimed to have been influenced to make a purchase because of email. Taking time to send personalized emails to wish your customers “Happy Birthday” or “Seasons Greetings” is another way to help build customer relationships throughout the year. Small businesses that send regular email updates can expect to see a high return on investment. MailChimp offers their email marketing service for free for up to 2,000 emails while companies such as Aweber and Constant Contact have packages that range from $1 to $19 per month.

Save Time and Get More Business With Online Scheduling

Why spend time scheduling your customers, when they can schedule themselves? According to Schedulista, over 75% of their customer’s clients schedule their appointments during non-business hours. If your business relies on appointments, online appointment scheduling software is the perfect solution for managing your busy schedule. If you plan on trying email marketing, Schedulista offers email integration with MailChimp that automatically keeps your client records up to date, so you don’t need to import and export email addresses manually.

Find New Customers With Gift Certificates

By encouraging your clients to buy gift certificates for their friends and families, you can generate more brand awareness and attract new customers. According to Practical Ecommerce, 41% of consumers will try a new product or service because of a gift certificate and 72% will return even after using up the balance of the certificate. The Motley Fool reports that the average customer is likely to spend 20% more than the gift card amount. This makes for a very attractive return on investment, especially since gift certificates are inexpensive to make. A set of 50 customized gift certificates with envelopes starts at about $17.99 through Vista Print.

Update Your Website, Blog and Social Media Accounts

The advertising and research firm Bia Kesely recently reported that over 97% of consumers research local businesses through some kind of online media. If you are offering special holiday deals, gift certificates or planning special events, it’s crucial that you make sure people can easily find out about them. Many businesses make the mistake of believing that a single Facebook status update is enough. It’s not. It’s important to regularly update your company’s web page, google business page and blog (if you have one).

Keep Your Clients Engaged with Facebook

In a recent Forbes survey, 78% of people said that a business’s social media posts affected their purchasing decisions. 81% stated that their friends’ posts directly influence their purchasing decisions. The more engagement you can have with your Facebook page, the more likely it is that your clients will share your page and influence their friends to find out about your business. Posting a holiday themed photo or recipe contests on Facebook is a great way to build community and keep customers engaged. Companies such as Short Stack make it simple to create contests and holiday calendars.

Be Consistent

Professional Marketers know the importance of staying in contact with customers all year round. Yet, after the holiday season, many businesses slow down their marketing efforts. January is an excellent time to continue to make social media updates, send out emails or even mail postcards to thank customers for their support over the holiday season and to wish them a Happy New Year.

Megan Dodge

555

26 Dec, 2013

5 Ways to Improve Your App Promotion Efforts

The App Store is a ferociously competitive landscape to promote an app with. With over a million apps on the store, cost per install prices increasing and superstar freemium companies snatching up all the money, getting your app noticed by users is a tricky prospect.

So how can you help get your app up to the top of the charts and into the hands of users? We’ve got five easy ways for you to improve your app promotion efforts and help turn your app into one of the greats on the store.

1) Make something that people want

This might seem like I’m stating the obvious, but if you’re not releasing something that people want to download then they aren’t going to bother to get your app from the store.

There are two distinct things that you need to do to make sure that people want your app. The first is to ensure that your idea shines in comparison to what else is on the store. As an example, there are a lot of infinite runners on the App Store and a lot are shameless rip offs of Temple Run. But the recently released Boson X, which heavily borrows infinite running mechanics, twists the genre around by turning it into a ferociously challenging level driven game which echoes Super Hexagon. A pinch of innovation can go a long way to standing out.

Second, it’s a great idea to make sure that your app evolves to take advantage of seasonal interest. At MagicSolver, we’ve built on the success of our daily app discovery service, Free App Magic, by releasing event specific calendars for Advent, Halloween, Valentine’s Day and major sporting events. Like the way big companies create special Christmas ad campaigns to sell their products, updating your app with seasonal content and keywords is a great way of latching on to consumer interest to boost yourself up the charts.

2) Harness the power of organic installs

Speaking of natural interest, one of the most important things you need to be doing before you spend a dollar on promoting your app is making sure you are fine tuned to benefit from so called organic installs. They are free downloads accrued either through app store search or from people talking about your app and they are one of the cheapest and most effective ways of getting installs.

First up, you should spend time optimizing your app store assets and keywords, as they’re essential for strong download performance on the app store. Strong icon and screenshot design is essential to appeal to people browsing through the store; a well written app store description is a great way to capture uncertain users and perfectly selected keywords can result in an additional 3,000-16,000 installs a month for a free app — an important first step to capturing floating users.

Second, you need to build strong social and rate & review mechanics into your app. By encouraging people to share your app and review it when they’ve had a positive experience, you can successfully increase consumer trust and benefit from changes to the App Store ranking algorithm that rewards positive reviews. How can you go about doing it? Well, in case you need inspiration, King’s Candy Crush Saga is an excellent example of how social mechanics can be used to great effect, while Fireproof Studios’ The Room benefitted from thousands of good reviews by presenting the review option to users at the end of every satisfying chapter.

3) Make your app free

This is arguably the most important thing you need to do to make your app a success. While games like Ridiculous Fishing, Badland and Infinity Blade have shown that paid apps can be a success for some, the case for a free to play as a tool for successful app promotion is clear. 90% of apps released this year were free to play according to Flurry and a couple of reasons make it clear why yours should be too.

First, there is the obvious reason, which is that well designed free to play games generate enormous revenues. While a paid game like Badland garnered $700,000 revenue in over three months of promotion, top grossing apps like Clash of Clans and Candy Crush Saga make that in a day. It’s clear that if you want to be in the money then your app needs to be in the free charts.

More importantly, the second and less obvious reason you need to make your app free is that it opens up your options for marketing your app on mobile considerably. While paid apps can rarely get away with advertising and struggle to convince people to try them out due to the price barrier, free apps have no such problems.

By releasing your app for free, you will significantly increase the number of people willing to try your app, meaning that your organic downloads will increase as well as the effectiveness of your adverts. Going free also opens up options to insert advertising SDKs into your app, allowing you to display ads for revenue or swap installs with other developers. Making an app free brings you a much greater promotional flexibility and it is something you should be considering long and hard if you have a decent advertising budget.

4) Test out ad networks

With CPIs going through the roof, you need to make sure that you’re getting the best bang for your buck when you’re using advertising networks. So make sure you test a load out before you decide which one to spend most of your money on.

Why? Because you need to know if you’re actually returning on your advertising investment before you spend. By working with a number of install providers, integrating a number of SDKs and using a third party tracking service to check whether or not players you acquire are spending enough, you can quickly and easily identify which networks are going to return your investment. This ensures that you learn where your promotional spending and efforts are best spent.

5) Optimize your ads

Lastly, once you’ve gotten your advertising efforts started, you need to work hard to make sure your advertising creatives are working as well as they can for you.

When you first set up a campaign with a network, you should make sure you have a variety of wordings and images to test to see which users react to. Once the campaign is finished, you should easily be able to identify which messages and images work best so you can use them in the future and, crucially, improve their effectiveness in the future. By continually refreshing and critiquing your creative, you can make your advertising spend work much harder for you.

Emmanuel Carraud

405

25 Dec, 2013

Digital Advertising 101

Ad inventory, ad impressions, fill rate and eCPM are terms that app developers throw around day in and day out.

At SponsorPay, we know that the language of digital advertising involves an initial learning curve. In an effort to explain what these acronyms actually mean, we’ve compiled an overview of several concepts that drive the success of any ad monetization strategy. The basic overview below emphasizes the perspective of web and mobile developers employing ad-based monetization in their games and apps.

Let’s begin!

Developers with free apps available on iOS, Android or the web often leverage advertising to create a reliable, predictable revenue stream. What does this business model actually look like?

Monetizing an app with ads follows a very simple equation:

Revenue =

Amount of ad space that the developer has for sale (ad inventory)

x Percentage of inventory that actually gets bought (the fill rate)

x The revenue a developer receives for 1,000 ads sold (eCPM)

As you can see there are three primary elements here:

Ad inventory

A developer’s ad inventory is a term that describes the totality of the advertising space available on a certain digital property. It is the total number of opportunities the developer has to show an ad. In other words, it’s the total inventory the developer can sell to advertisers. Naturally, a developer can increase revenue by increasing the ad spaces in the application, assuming other factors stay constant. That said, it’s critical that ad placement and user experience are always considered.

eCPM

eCPM or “effective cost per mille” is the amount of revenue received for 1,000 ad impressions. It’s calculated by dividing the amount of ad revenue by the number of ad impressions (when a user is shown an ad) and multiplying by 1,000. For example, if a developer earned 12,500 USD one week based on one million ad impressions, the eCPM for that week would be 12.5 USD. The value is used to compare the performance of ad formats and ad providers, and to evaluate changes in performance over time.

Fill rate

Fill rate is the ratio between the number of times a developer requested an ad to be shown divided by the number of times an ad was actually returned from an ad network or other source. Of course, revenue is only generated when ads are shown, so it’s critical that developers have a high fill rate, lest they forfeit potential revenue. Fill rate = Actual ad impressions / Ad requests

So, how does ad monetization fit in?

Available ad inventory, fill rate and eCPM are the key drivers of any ad monetization strategy. An effective ad monetization strategy aims to increase fill rate and eCPM, thereby allowing a developer to earn the highest revenue from a given app’s ad inventory.

Fill rate is of the utmost importance when it comes to ad monetization because revenue is only generated when an ad is shown. To address the challenge of insufficient fill rate, many developers are turning to mediation. Mediation solutions like SponsorPay’s allow developers to use one platform to integrate, manage and optimize different sources of ads. Meanwhile, developers can let hundreds of demand partners from our Ad Marketplace bid on their ad inventory. These options increase the overall number of ads available to a developer.

Developers also strive to serve ads with the highest eCPM. Holistic yield optimization, one feature of SponsorPay’s Ad Monetization Platform, ensures that the ads that are filling a developers ad requests are always the highest-paying ads available. The goal is not only to optimize, but also to simplify the process for developers. SpnsorPay’s AutoPilot, for instance, enables developers to maximize eCPM automatically in real time, eliminating the need to continually adjust prioritization settings.

Understanding the definitions and relationship of these key concepts is square one in learning more about the accelerating world of ad monetization. It’s an ever-changing environment, but one with endless growth potential. We hope that breaking down these ideas has given you a sense of the challenges faced by developers and the innovative solutions companies are creating to solve them.

Felix Speiser Jessa Moon

365

17 Dec, 2013

How Display Advertising Can Aid a Political Campaign

In the eyes of a voter, political campaigns are rarely seen as advertising or marketing campaigns. Yet, that is exactly what they are.

Today, both politicians and PACs widely use traditional media, like TV ads, radio interviews and commercials, and newspaper coverage, to reach the voting population. However, these politicians could be greatly aided by using display marketing on the internet as a way to connect with and get their message in the minds of voters.

Display marketing can be utilized by a politician or PAC who would display specific ads on carefully chosen sites geared towards certain audiences. For example, a candidate might run an ad advocating their desire to sponsor an anti-animal cruelty bill on a pet adoption website. The visitors to this website will likely be people who own or want to own animals, and would be interested in learning about this proposed bill. This display ad would direct a specific segment of people to a candidate who shares their feelings and opinions on this subject.

The benefits of this strategy extend past individual candidates and into the bigger picture. Display marketing can drive interest and momentum in a political race, especially with Generation Y, who use the internet frequently as a means for gathering information and staying on top of the news. Bringing the political race to them will increase the likelihood that they will get involved and vote.

Being able to extend political visibility to as many platforms and audiences as possible is the goal of a political campaign manager, so utilizing the internet to direct voters to a politician’s webpage is a logical extension of current efforts.

Besides gaining traction with specific voter segments, display marketing is also a savvy way for candidates to connect with a local audience. Placing advertising about issues relating to a specific community on local webpages is a great way to get residents involved and informed. This helps reel in voters, gains traction in the race, and generates public interest and investment in political issues.

Display advertising has numerous advantages, many of which can be strategically utilized by candidates to deliver information about their stance on important issues to relevant audiences. In a modern world, all candidates should harness this important resource.

Ted Dhanik

332

Category: advertising

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