Tag: online advertising

  • Getting To Know Your Customers by Creating Buyer Personas

    Getting To Know Your Customers by Creating Buyer Personas

    Do you know who your business’s buyer personas are? And if so, how much do you know about them? Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on data and research. They help you focus your time on qualified prospects, guide product development to suit the needs of your target customers, and align all work across your organization – from marketing to sales to service.

    A buyer persona, in user-centered design and marketing is a fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way. Marketers may use personas together with market segmentation, where the qualitative personas are constructed to be representative of specific segments. Personas are said to be cognitively compelling because they put a personal human face on otherwise abstract data about customers. By thinking about the needs of a fictional persona, designers may be better able to infer what a real person might need. Such inference may assist with brainstorming, use case specification, and features definition. Pruitt and Adlin argue that personas are easy to communicate to engineering teams and thus allow engineers, developers, and others to absorb customer data in a palatable format. https://www.hubspot.com/make-my-persona?utm_source=mktg-resources

    Personas also help prevent some common design pitfalls which may otherwise be easy to fall into. The first is designing for what Cooper calls “The Elastic User”, by which he means that while making product decisions different stakeholders may define the ‘user’ according to their convenience. Defining personas helps the team have a shared understanding of the real users in terms of their goals, capabilities, and contexts. Personas also help prevent “self-referential design” when the designer or developer may unconsciously project their own mental models on the product design which may be very different from that of the target user population. Personas also provide a reality check by helping designers keep the focus of the design on cases that are most likely to be encountered for the target users and not on edge cases which usually will not happen for the target population. According to Cooper, edge cases which should naturally be handled properly should not become the design focus.

    The persona benefits are summarized as follows:
    • Help team members share a specific, consistent understanding of various audience groups. Data about the groups can be put in a proper context and can be understood and remembered in coherent stories.
    • Proposed solutions can be guided by how well they meet the needs of individual user personas. Features can be prioritized based on how well they address the needs of one or more personas.
    • Provide a human “face” so as to create empathy for the persons represented by the demographics.
    When you first created your buyer personas, you looked at trends in your database in addition to getting feedback from your marketing and sales teams. To validate your buyer personas quantitatively, you’re going to re-examine the data initially collected.

    “You do another contact analysis based on everything you’ve learned up until that point — that’s the re-evaluation process,” Karin says. “Anything that you use to qualify the buyer personas, you should be measuring against that. Is it true that job title majority is Vice President of Ops or are we seeing that 80% of the job titles coming in are CTO instead? If that’s the case, either you have your personas wrong or the content you create isn’t speaking to the right personas.”

    Data-driven personas
    Data-driven personas (sometimes also called quantitative personas) these methods generally take numerical input data, reduce its dimensionality, and output higher level abstractions (e.g., clusters, components, factors) that describe the patterns in the data. These patterns are typically interpreted as “skeletal” personas, and enriched with personified information (e.g., name, portrait picture). Quantitative personas can also be enriched with qualitative insights to generate mixed method personas (also called hybrid personas).
    Buyer personas help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better. This makes it easier for you to tailor your content, messaging, product development, and services to meet the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of the members of your target audience.

    Look at the demographic and firmographic information in addition to their digital body language. Were their early touchpoints through the channels you thought were most effective for reaching them? Did they follow the conversion paths you expected them to? Are your customers coming from the locations or industries you expected them to?

    Additionally, look at how the changes in your contact database compare to your company’s growth goals. Even if you currently have a healthy contact database that matches with your buyer personas, if it isn’t growing the way your company wants to, you’ll have difficulty meeting your goals in the future.

    Key is always be reviewing your results against your personas and revising with the current information by doing so you are continuously learning about your buyers and can cater your marketing messaging to them better.

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    Sources:
    Wikipedia
    Hubspot Marketing Blog
    New Breed Revenue

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  • This is our second Blog in our 8 week You Tube video series – Choosing a Direction for your video

    This is our second Blog in our 8 week You Tube video series – Choosing a Direction for your video

    Today’s blog focusses on choosing a direction for your video to be produced, but first there are a few minor but key points that need to be considered before any video shooting begins. First off there are the 3 stages of video production: Pre-production — This is when everything is being planned. Suppose you’re shooting a film, then the pre-production process will include: writing a script, casting, planning costumes, budget, location, etc. Production — This is the time of the action. And the last stage is Post Production which involves editing the video and finalizing it.

    Once you have organized for the three stages of your video project it would be smart to consider these 8 points to keep in mind as you go through the making of your video.

    Tips for Creating Marketing Videos
    1. Tell a Story. Instead of being overtly salesy, an effective video tells a story.
    2. Make Sure the Introduction Stands Out.
    3. Create a Stimulating Title.
    4. Focus on the Mission and Less on the Product.
    5. Don’t Be Boring.
    6. Get a Little Bit Risqué!
    7. Make it Mobile Friendly.
    8. Think About SEO.

    Now that you have your frame work mapped out then it is time to consider these starting points:

    How to Create a Good Video
    1. Find a good camera. An 8-megapixel phone camera or better will get the job done well.
    2. Pick a good location. Find a place find a place with good lighting.
    3. Get a good angle. You should probably place the camera at or above shoulder height.
    4. Speak clearly.
    5. Be alive!
    6. Transfer for editing.
    7. Edit on YouTube.
    8. Make short clips.

    Choose a direction
    Now that you have your “why,” it should be a little bit easier to determine what makes sense in terms of direction.
    For example, let’s say you’re a new company who wants to create an intro video for the homepage hero on your site; the goal of the video is to introduce the brand and get people to sign up.
    In this case, you would likely go with a video that’s more along the lines of “introductory” or “explanatory” in nature. You may even find that a combination of several directions makes sense.
    For example, maybe you’re a new company, but you’re up against a lot of competition. Perhaps an “introductory” style video with a “problem/solution” angle would be ideal (showing the “old way” as the problem and the “new way” [meaning your company] as the solution).
    To give you some ideas, here’s a list of possible directions you could go in:

    • Introductory: tell your audience who you are, explain your mission, etc.
    • Explanatory: explain how something works (like your product or a specific feature)
    • Problem/solution: show the old way/new way and how your product is the solution
    • Narrative: use story elements (like plot, conflict, resolution, etc) to subtly introduce or explain something
    • Drive action: get the audience to do something (i.e. — shop now)
    • Product-focused: introduce or showcase a specific product or feature
    • Testimonial: interviews, quotes, soundbytes, etc, with customers around a specific topic or theme
    • Endorsement: use of celebrity or influencer approval / likeness
    • Informative: educate your audience about something specific, tutorial-style, etc.
    • Entertainment: delight or inspire your audience using story, humor, etc.

    Once you have your goal and direction finalized, it’s time to further refine your approach by setting the tone for your video.

    Sources:

    https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=tips+on+choosing+a+direction+for+a+video+production

    https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-create-a-promotional-video-707fa7a63019

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  • Welcome to the fourth installment of our Blog series on Social media and online marketing

    Welcome to the fourth installment of our Blog series on Social media and online marketing

    In this blog we will show how the big data companies like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Google and others have grown to a larger market capitalization industry than the oil and gas sector. Much like drilling for oil and gas you have to mine big data and for those of you who don’t know how big data works we will provide this brief example. Let’s say you are in a particular industry for example, you own a micro brewery and you want to sell to consumers who like micro brewed beer.

    Someone with the resources can target market on the internet and use Social Media marketing. For example, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or Google and target that exact consumer for micro brewed beer. Not only will they see what their competitors are selling their beer for but they can optimize their pricing so that they can get a large part of that particular industry. In short, big data allows a few players to take advantage of entire industries by marketing exactly to those most likely to purchase micro brewed beer.

    But first we should continue our brief look back at the history of online marketing from 2010 to present day.

    2010 – present: Marketers find value in native ads
    Around this time, a new group of media companies began to emerge. Websites like BuzzFeed and Mashable presented advertisers with new opportunities to connect with their audiences through sponsored content and native advertising.

    Advertisers pay to produce articles, videos, and other types of content for news and media sites. The nature of the content itself is promotional, but the format looks less like an ad and more like a regular piece of content on the host’s website. Instead of relying on ads that disrupt their target audience’s online experience, native advertising allows marketers to create promotional content that supplements a user’s online experience. “Marketers interested in targeting ads to specific consumers in an unobtrusive fashion should seriously consider spending some time on native ads.”

    Websites that traditionally generated revenue from display ads began to realize that they could create a better user experience by relying primarily on native ads — rather than traditional display ads — without compromising on ad revenue. However, we are seeing more and more companies today focussing on creating quality original content in order to gain market share and they are shying away from Native Ads.

    The Future of Advertising
    That’s a look back at the history of online advertising — but what about the future?
    According to recent data from HubSpot Research, 91% of respondents say ads are more intrusive today compared to just two to three years ago. It’s clear that the future of digital advertising pivots on developing a targeted ad experience that offers consumers relevant content without feeling nosy or invasive. In order to understand the growth and progression of this type of advertising it is important to examine Big Data.

    “Big data” is a field that treats ways to analyze, systematically extract information from, or otherwise deal with data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data-processing application software. “The estimated value for the industry due to digital transformation is about $1.7 trillion. “Data is the new oil. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so, must data be broken down, analyzed for it to have value.”

    Wikipedia states that Big Data in the analysis of data sets one can find new correlations to “spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on.” Scientists, business executives, practitioners of medicine, advertising and governments alike regularly meet difficulties with large data-sets in areas including Internet searches, fintech, urban informatics, and business informatics. Scientists encounter limitations in e-Science work, including meteorology, genomics, connectomics, complex physics simulations, biology and environmental research.

    Data sets grow rapidly, in part because they are increasingly gathered by inexpensive and numerous information-sensing internet-based devices such as mobile devices, aerial (remote sensing), software logs, cameras, microphones, radio-frequency identification (RFID) readers and wireless sensor networks. By 2025, IDC predicts there will be 163 zettabytes of data. One question for large enterprises is determining who should own big-data initiatives that affect the entire organization

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    Sources:

    Blog.hubspot.com/marketing/history-of-online-advertising

    Towardsdatascience.com/data-is-the-new-oil-even-in-the-oil-and-gas-industry-a3daa58d743d

  • Part II: Continuation of examining the history of online paid advertising : 1999 – 2002: Advertisers turn to paid search and pay-per-click

    Part II: Continuation of examining the history of online paid advertising : 1999 – 2002: Advertisers turn to paid search and pay-per-click

    Direct marketing is a form of communicating an offer, where organizations communicate directly to a pre-selected-customer and supply a method for a direct response. Among practitioners, it is also known as direct response marketing. By contrast, advertising is of a mass-message nature, whereas online marketing drives brand awareness for your company, events, content and products or services. Digital marketing is the process of promoting your business online. There are dozens of different strategies that can be a part of this process.All of these strategies are designed to improve brand awareness and consistently grow your business over time.

    With a minimal investment, digital marketing can change the future of your company by earning you more customers, bringing in more revenue, and achieving your business goals. We are continuing our blog series by looking back at the development of online marketing over the past several years. As banner ads continued to gain popularity, advertisers became increasingly interested in targeting specific consumer demographics, rather than just placing their ads wherever space was offered and hoping the right people would see it. This led to the beginning of targeted ad placement. WebConnect, an ad agency that specialized in online ads, began helping their clients identify websites their ideal consumers visited. Now, companies could place ads where their target demographics were more likely to see them.This was nothing short of revolutionary in the digital advertising space.  Not only were companies reaching more relevant audiences, but websites hosting the ads were also able to display banners that were more applicable to their visitors.

    1999 – 2002: Advertisers turn to paid search and pay-per-clickBy this time, the web was expanding rapidly and users needed a better way to navigate the terrain. With search engines steadily gaining popularity, advertisers looked to create ads that were more targeted and less loathsome. They turned to sponsored search as the next digital advertising frontier.

    In 1999, GoTo.com — an emerging search engine company that would later be acquired by Yahoo — introduced the first pay-for-placement search engine service. Advertisers were given the opportunity to bid for top search engine results on particular keywords. Despite some initial outcries that paid search would lead to corrupt results, GoTo.com was able to monetize their search engine through the model. Pay-for-placement eventually evolved into pay-per-click. Companies bid on search result placement on a per-click basis: e.g., I’ll pay GoTo.com $1 per click if you put my company as the top search result. This led to search results that were largely determined by how much a company was willing to pay. The highest bidders were usually listed first, even above more relevant content, and it was unclear to users which results were paid and which were organic content.The user experience of paid search was suffering, and one up-and-coming search engine thought they could fix it.

    Google introduced AdWords in 2000, originally under a pay-for-placement ad model. Google wanted to create a sponsored search experience that generated revenue without compromising the quality and relevancy of search results.This is where we will start to get a bit more detailed in our blog series regarding paid online marketing which is quickly becoming the standard for all business marketing needs.In our next blog, we will examine the growth of paid advertising from 2002 when Google started with pay-per-click advertising and examine the evolution of this marketing tool to where we are today. The future looks very bright for online marketing and those who get in now will dominate their business field in the next 5 years while others will flounder.Source From Karla Cook for hubspot.com <https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/history-of-online-advertising

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  • It’s High school all over again!!! 

    It’s High school all over again!!! 

    The internet in many ways has made our lives a lot like being in high school all over again, while this is a broad statement, we will only be focusing on that part of high school which separates the popular kids from the not so popular kids and the academic over achievers from the middle of the roaders and this will be a six part blog series for the summer focusing on the growth of paid online advertising and the use of Facebook, You Tube, Instagram and Twitter (Branding). 

    Like every society past present and future our very existence is dependant on a few vital things for our survival and advancement, these being food, shelter and clothing. Now the human condition is to always be innovating and advancing through technology and science.  In June of 1836, French newspaper La Presse was the first to include paid advertising in its pages, which allowed them to lower their newspaper price, extend its readership and this is where our story begins. Fast forward to 1999 to 2002, advertisers turned to pay per click and paid search and then in 2006 digital ads become hyper targeted. Since then online advertising has been growing at a feverish pace.

    Remember when “surfing the net” meant traversing a minefield of unwelcome pop-up ads? When “digital advertising” referred almost exclusively to obnoxious flashing banners and random sidebar ads? 

    AT&T paid Hot Wired $30,000 to place their banner ad on their site for three months. The ad enjoyed a click-through-rate of 44% — a number that would make most marketers balk in disbelief today. To put that in perspective, the average clickthrough rate on display ads today — 22 years later — is closer to 0.06%.

    The user experience of paid search was suffering, and one up-and-coming search engine thought they could fix it. Google introduced AdWords in 2000, originally under a pay-for-placement ad model. Google wanted to create a sponsored search experience that generated revenue without compromising the quality and relevancy of search results.

    While previous paid search models like GoTo.com relied on bids from advertisers to determine search rankings, AdWords introduced a Score model, which took into account an ad’s clickthrough rate when determining its placement on the search results page. Even if an ad had a lower bid, it would still appear above other less relevant paid ads in search results thanks to its high clickthrough rate. The Quality Score model is still used today.

    Today paid advertising also depends a lot on social media accounts and the number of visitors and followers to those accounts.  Advertisers will pay influencers like the Kardashians tens of thousands of dollars to have a post on one of their platforms i.e. Instagram. In this case, the Kardashians would be the cool kids and this is where the high school analogy comes in. The more followers you have on your social media accounts, the more traffic you command, thus the more advertisers will pay to reach your audience.

    It’s essential that your content is current, original and interesting this keeps visitors coming back and the chance of getting them as clients.

    Over the next 6 weeks we will explore where online marketing originated and where it is going and also, we are going to explore the making of videos with your smart phone which will be good enough to post.

    Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/history-of-online-advertising

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  • Online advertising and Grabbing Their Attention

    In tweeting you can never do enough online branding. With this form of advertising as long as you are sending the right messages and these messages are, we are a responsible company or organization that can handle all of your needs. Today it is easy to create marketing material and put it out there. The real question is does it work, are you reaching your target market? The truest form of advertising today is search advertising. This is because no one goes onto Google ( Usually anyway ) and types in Hotel Montreal unless they are looking to book a hotel to stay in Montreal and so search is pure. Twenty years ago the Yellow Pages directory was in every home across North America and if we needed a plumber we would simply go to the P’s and find “plumbers” Usually the largest add and the one on the first page under “plumbers” got the most business. Today Google search results works much the same way. Once searching for a product or service simply type into a Google search bar the most relevant “Key words” and view the query results.

     

    Given the fact that most homes and businesses have Pc’s or Mac’s it is safe to say that most people are simply searching online for their products or services or other information readily available to them on the internet.The trend today is that with in two years most Magazines, Books, Newspapers, Directories and Periodicals will be offered online. This is why it is very important that small and medium sized companies take advantage of the fact that “organic results” in Canada are still in it’s infancy and there are allot of good domains with relevant key words available for website foundations. At nexonta Technologies we keep current on all of the latest trends in online advertising and marketing. Like I always say the place to start is with a good website. Once you have a clean content driven site with very clean code then this is a good place to start. After that you can concentrate on online

    branding and SEO.

     

    The internet is growing in terms of users every year and soon there will be more money being made online as opposed to offline!! And so it is important to take advantage of this growing opportunity. Register a good domain and create a user friendly website with industry relevant content. Remember a website is only the start to your online advertising campaign ofter that there is Linking, Ad-words, Adsence, Social networking and Blogging etc. these practices all constitute SEO and there is allot of work involved. So set a budget, do what you can on your own and Call us today for a free quote!

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