Buzz Marketing and The Power of the Word of Mouth

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I remember way back in my college days how many professors would stress to us the importance of word-of-mouth in marketing. Even before the digital age, consumers have always been one of the most powerful advertising agents. Although brands can spend millions of dollars in amazing advertising campaigns, sometimes it just takes a “free” reliable recommendation to make up a consumer’s mind. 

Word of mouth has gained even more valuable meaning in the digital age. It has evolved from a personal one-on-one conversation to a very public and loud statement. And today, with the overwhelming amount of options and online advertising invading our daily lives, marketers are always trying to find new ways to cut through the noise and generate connections with their audience that can eventually grow to the point of advocacy. 

Buzz Marketing is a great way to achieve that. With the right content, you are not only going to create awareness and get consumers interested in your brand, but you want to get them talking. The more the consumers talk, the more interesting your brand becomes. Getting that “buzz” or word of mouth is not an easy task. We have to create a compelling story, get the audience interested in it and facilitate its distribution. So it’s not only us, the brand, telling it, but the consumer itself, sometimes even in their own words, sharing our story with others, making it more believable.

You can check out this fun example https://www.buzzfeed.com/jeannettevigil/top-5-bourbon-drinks-you-must-try-this-summer-20t9fr2zyq

The Future of Omnichannel Marketing? A Lesson From the Beauty Industry

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I’ve been learning quite a lot about channel marketing and retail in the last couple of months, and as the journey of getting my master’s degree in marketing comes to an end I wanted to talk about what the future holds for the retail industry. 

There’s been a lot of talk on how traditional retail is dead, big retailers closing stores and e-commerce still growing strong and taking over brick-and-mortar stores, but I do not believe that is the reality, it’s not that retail is dying, but consumers are changing and businesses need to keep evolving, adapting and truly investing in digital and omnichannel strategies. 

The Beauty Industry

We can find a great example of this in the beauty industry. According to the NPD Group, the prestige beauty industry reached $18.8 billion in sales during 2018, that is a 6% sales increase over the previous year. And while this can be contributed to many factors, like new players in the industry, a lot comes from the way beauty retailers and brands are leveraging technology and in-store shopping to deliver unique experiences for their shoppers. 

Experiences and Innovation

Just today, I saw on the news that beauty retailer Sephora is planning to open 35 new stores in the U.S.. Sephora, owned by the French group LVMH, proves how the right mix of offerings and an omnichannel approach can benefit businesses. From their physical stores, that now offer multiple services for clients, like skin treatments or makeup classes, to their online strategy.

On their mobile app for example, users can not only easily shop for their favorite products but they can even try on shades of makeup thanks to AR technology. Continuously testing different strategies and innovations to leverage digital, the retailer focuses on their customers, providing them with a seamless and upscale shopping experience. 

Betting for Traditional

This is also working the other way around. In 2017 the online brand Kylie Cosmetics partnered with retailer Topshop and launched pop-up stores throughout major US cities, since opening its doors, all locations gathered massive crowds and completely sold out.

While this brand was already performing incredibly well in their e-commerce site, helping their founder obtain the title of youngest self-made billionaire, they saw an incredible opportunity in creating an experience for their customers that would allow them to interact with the brand and products up close and personal.

In a similar move, the brand made a deal with Ulta, a major beauty retailer in the U.S. to place a smaller selection of their product line on their shelves. Strategically priced in a mid point between drugstore and high-end brands and a limited selection, there was no surprise that the products were constantly selling out. 

Final thoughts

With a strong online presence, offline experiences, clever social media and influencer strategies, as well as consumer knowledge, the beauty industry is leading the way to what should be the future of retail. Leading companies are understanding the importance of innovation and adapting to new market trends and consumer needs, all of this to improve the overall shopping experience of their customers.

Digital Innovations and the future for agencies: Interview with Peak Seven CEO Darren Seys

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Darren Seys is the founder and CEO of Peak Seven Advertising, an award-winning advertising, and marketing agency in Boca Raton. With over two decades of experience in the industry, Darren leads a talented team of results-driven marketers and creative designers to achieve great results and help their clients’ business grow.

I had a chance to talk with Darren about his work in advertising and how the digital and technological transformation has impacted the way agencies work today.

 

Thank you for your time today Darren. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself and your company, Peak Seven?

I grew up on a farm, moved to South Florida, and got my start as an illustrator for Nascar. Ultimately ended up in Boca Raton. Had an agency and sold it and started Peak Seven in 1999. Peak Seven is a full-service Ad Agency, that started of really with a branding and design background and morphed into a more of a high-level technology digital marketing agency, with branding as well, but the digital took over the branding as far as our main services.

 

How do you think the role of the Agency has evolved through the years?

Agencies typically would actually manage the media at a high level, some ad agencies made most their money in media commission. But it has evolved now, where the transparency out there, that the media outlets have basically stepped around agencies and sell direct. So agencies had to make themselves more valuable in other ways.

Fortunately for the agency world, technology has evolved so much that it basically gave the agency a ton of value in the strategy side of the business. It allowed us to have a skill set that a lot of people couldn’t find. You would have, not just an artist and creative people in-house, but now you also have roles like digital strategists, and of course, media still being a big part of it.

 

What are your greatest concerns as the CEO of a digital agency?

That technology gets so advanced that you can do the bulk of what we are doing now, yourself (the client). The metrics and the platforms will basically do so much testing for you, even if you aren’t doing it well, it can actually funnel it through to where it allows you to get high performance, even without heavy strategy or agencies behind it, trying to create the best opportunity for you to gain ROI on your money.

You already have platforms like Facebook and Google that kinda tell you, you should be doing this, consider that. With Facebook now you can upload five headlines, five subheaders, ten images and it rotates to a hundred different scenarios and combination of an ad, something you could never do before, you can run a Facebook campaign yourself.

 

What are the biggest challenges for digital agencies in today’s digital environment?

Staying ahead of it and finding what actually works best for the client. Obviously, we have our verticals that we deal with, but it’s forever changing. Right now, the best thing for agencies is a lot of new technology that will continue to come out, it makes us stay ahead of the game.

Also, talent, high-level talent. That literally makes a difference in the performance. You are always going to have the marketing strategy side of everything, forgetting the technology for a second, someone that has to put together the plans, ideas, the vision, the target audience and what the client is trying to go for. The technology comes in the implementation and in reaching those goals.

It used to be you bought tv, you bought radio, you ran print ads, newspaper ads, and that’s how you reached your market. Now, there are thousands of different channels to reach them, then what metrics you use for KPI’s, so data analysis and data crunching is the space that’s gonna be hugely valuable in the future, already is now.

There are agencies out there already hiring data scientist, and they are starting out at $200,000 out of college, based on their degree and what they did, just to crunch the data. You know why? It’s all trackable, and then you just have to do actionable items out of it.

 

What are your thoughts on the digital and technological transformation affecting this industry? We hear about AI, chatbots, programmatic advertising, voice search and so on. How do you think all of this is impacting ad agencies and clients?

AI is going to be everything. I was in Hong Kong and I saw some demonstrations of what they are doing now with it and it’s literally going to be everything in my opinion. You can feed it so much information and it’s so smart that it can learn from it. On your day to day communication, the first point of contact in your company a lot of the times is a person, that is getting eliminated, now with bots and AI, we are even going to be able to get faces that are computer generated, and they will talk and everything.

You’ll be interacting with avatars all the time, and not even realize it, they are going to be so educated that people are going to accept it. Fifteen years ago you never thought you would buy a car online, and years from now people are going to be communicating with these avatars like it’s no big deal, my rep is Johnny and he is not even real. To me artificial intelligence is huge.

 

In your opinion, what’s the biggest trend in the near future that marketers should not ignore?

On the digital marketing side, I’ve heard that with these privacy laws, what you were able to do, you were able to target people with geo-fencing, geo-targeting, income, gender and all those types of things. The reality is the more the privacy laws expand, the less that stays relevant. So, ironically, the organic results are gonna come back into play, the whole world of SEO, that was kinda pushed with paid, SEO may come back to play because you’re not going to be able to target as much.

Cookies are going to get removed, from browsers and everything like that. I think even this week, Chrome is going to be losing those cookies, right, so when you look at retargeting, remarketing, as they say, a cookie may be active for 24h hours. That changes everything on paid advertising.

I also think there’s a trend where most verticals, if they are performance-based campaigns, are going to end up in a few channels, based on the verticals you’re in. We work with Real State so we have some channels that just perform, you’re not really going to do anything else. It used to be back in the day, with magazines, you would run 10 magazines because you weren’t sure which one was going to be working, now you’ll just know.

To me, it really affects brand awareness, because businesses don’t really look at it as a KPI or ROI. I spend a thousand dollars and had 100,000 impressions, that doesn’t work. You want to spend a thousand dollars and get leads. So brand awareness is getting much more difficult to actually sell and perform, to clients, because they have a budget, it’s super tight, everyone’s budgets are getting tighter, so if you can’t produce leads and or tangible assets that they can translate back to sales, you’re toast.

For some, it’s not like you’re Coke or Pepsi, where you can just put up billboards to keep people reminded of you. At least in the space that we deal in.

 

What would be the best recommendation you could give to businesses starting with digital advertising?

Take small budgets and test, test all the channels to see which one is performing the best for you. Define what your metrics are for performance, what does well, what doesn’t. If you do want to have some branding and exposure, try to work with two separate budgets, one that will be allocated to brand awareness and the other that is dedicated to performance. If you muddle the two together is going to skew the numbers on your ROI performance and not really be fair.

But yes, just test multiple channels, whether it is Pandora radio or Twitch, Snapchat, all these different channels, you don’t know which one is going to work best for you, maybe some of them will be a little more obvious, don’t be afraid to mix it up. You can’t just go with what’s working today, you will be surprised because there are so many niches online with all these different components.

Executing an Effective Inbound Marketing Campaign

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Inbound marketing campaigns can be quite complex since they require a whole process that goes from content creation to the attraction, generation, and retention of leads. This is why it is very important to have a clear path that will help us plan and execute a successful campaign.

Identify our objectives and budget.

We must take into consideration both the specific objectives of our campaign and the general objectives of the organization. The resources and the budget with which we have to carry out our marketing efforts. 

Who is our audience?

Define who is our target audience in the clearest way possible. Who is the buyer persona, their location, habits, etc? Be clear that inbound marketing not only wants to achieve a sale but to we want to generate a long-term value for the customers.

Content development

We have to create the message of our campaign, the content and creative designs. What are the benefits of my product? What makes us different from the others?

Prepare a Distribution Plan

What are the channels where we are going to promote our message? We must establish what are the most effective channels to reach our target audience. In the digital environment, there is a wide variety of platforms that will allow us to publish our contents. Social networks, landing pages, email, choose the most effective channels for your offer.

Launch and monitoring

Once everything is underway we should not let everything run on its own, monitoring the results and feedback of our campaign will allow us to track our leads and optimize if we are not having the desired performance.

Analyze the results

Finally, we must always rely on the data and metrics to know the success of our campaign. Let’s make a compilation of data about visits, leads and new clients to evaluate our results and use this information for future campaigns.

Best Tips To Succeed With SEO

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I have to say I was beyond excited when I saw Britney Muller, Senior SEO Scientist at Moz, on the list of speakers for the Digital Branding Analytics Miami 2019 Conference. Not only have I been an active follower of Moz and their #WhiteboardFriday, but SEO is one of those topics that everyone seems to talk about but not many seem to fully understand.

In a highly competitive digital environment, how our brands or businesses are positioned online is extremely important. If we put on our consumer hat, and go online to search for something we need, how likely is it that we are going to go past that first page of results? Almost no chance, right? This is why SEO is so important. Implementing the correct strategy, content or keywords can be a defining factor in the success of our marketing goals.

At #DBAMiami, Britney shared some amazing tips to help us understand the fundamentals of SEO and how can we apply these in our own jobs or businesses to better position ourselves and ultimately generate more sales. Here are some key takeaways:

Review Google suggestions

Google itself can help us improve our SEO rankings since whenever we start a search it will automatically show us similar searches being made. It also provides related words, or “long tail” keywords, that are being used with respect to the keyword we searched for.

 

Explore Google Trends

This tool allows us to explore what’s trending, look at the most popular topics in Google and compare searches and keywords. It can help us discover what are people searching for, who is searching for it, when or even in what regions or languages.

 

Creating content with link intent

According to Britney, “content and links are what makes SEO powerful.” This relates to what is known as linkbuilding. You want to create content that is going to generate quality backlinks to your site and increase the authority of your page. Britney recommends creating good FAQ pages to attract more qualified traffic to your site.

 

Read the first page results first

If we want to stand out and rank higher on the results page, we have to evaluate was already there and create something that’s “nearly 10x better”.  Our content has to be unique, original and most importantly extremely valuable to the users.

 

There’s definitely a great amount of strategies and tricks to implement SEO for our websites, and this is a great start. I invite you to learn more about SEO and check out Britney’s full presentation below:

Building Your Brand With SEO and SEM

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When we talk about digital marketing and analytics, we almost always think about metrics, the performance of our website, our advertising campaign results, number of conversions, clicks, etc., but rarely the concept of branding is the first thing that comes to mind. But there is a lot we can learn about our brands through analytics.

During the Digital Branding Analytics Miami 2019 Conference I attended recently, I heard an incredibly valuable talk by Hector Hernandez, Chief Digital Officer of McCann Worldgroup, about assessing brand value through Web Analytics.

At #DBAMiami, Hector made some very interesting points regarding digital strategies like SEM and SEO and how should brands implement these to help build their brand value over time. When we are designing our strategies and defining objectives for our SEM or SEO efforts, we have to understand how people are going to find us. In of his examples he mentions the brand “Nike”, and while a strong brand as such can rely heavily on branded traffic, with keywords such as “nike sneakers”, smaller companies might want to take a more generic approach in the beginning with terms like “running shoes” to continue generating traffic, increasing awareness and building their branding progressively.

It’s extremely important that we understand our industry and market from the beginning, and how our potential customers are going to look for us online. Competitive analysis, keyword research tools and our own information from our analytics can give us valuable information about our audience and performance, and this will help us make the right decisions when we are creating our digital marketing strategies.

You can watch Hector’s full presentation in the video below:

Personal Mission Statement… Think Big!

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Developing a personal brand is fundamental to standout in a highly competitive and changing market. We want to be sure we are portraying a unique image that will help us attract the audience we need, whether we are looking to get a promotion, finding new opportunities or maybe establishing ourselves as thought leaders in our community.

A strong personal brand starts with a clear mission. This goes beyond your professional goals or having an eye-catching profile on social media, it’s about finding your purpose, your passions and talents. A personal mission statement plays a fundamental role in our personal brand strategy and what we want to achieve, when it’s clear and we embrace it, that generates more credibility and value.

This brought to mind the words of Joni Fernandez Marmo, former SVP of Consumer and Corporate Marketing at Univision, who gave a wonderful presentation at the Digital Branding Analytics Miami 2019 Conference #DBAmiami. She reminded us to not limit our possibilities and “think big”. Regardless of where we stand in our current career path, when we think about our goals and future we can’t limit ourselves to what we want to accomplish and how we are going to do it. Our mission comes from within and it will give us the fuel to go at it every day and work on achieving our goals.

You can see the entire presentation by Joni in the video below.

Customer Experience and Omnichannel Marketing

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It’s quite amazing when you stop and realize how much has marketing evolved throughout the years, especially thinking about channel marketing.

Today, industries traditionally centered in physical stores, like retail, for example, have already started making a switch to adapt to the new shopping behaviors of the digital era consumers, merging analog and digital worlds to create an integrated, omnichannel experience.

I recently attended the Digital Branding Analytics Miami 2019 Conference #DBAmiami and while listening to Kathy Mayor, CMO of Boxy Charm and former SVP & Chief Digital Officer of Carnival Cruise Lines, this whole concept of omnichannel marketing and customer experience really started to take form. Kathy spoke about her experience on Carnival and referred to a “7 part framework” highly focused on the consumer, their thought process, passions, experiences, and how to use this knowledge to find the best ways to approach them.

Brands that work with omnichannel strategies focus on understanding their audience, their customer journey and how the right combination of channels, campaigns, and content can finally influence purchases. As Kathy pointed out, they want to be able to reach all kinds of segments in the market, that’s why Carnival works not only through multiple channels, like social media, events, and activations, but with different partners like Amazon, Buzzfeed or celebrities like Ellen Degeneres or Guy Fieri and leverage the associations and distribution of these brands to help them tell their story and relate to their audience.  

Kathy mentioned a great example of how Carnival incorporated partnership into actual parts of their product with their work with Guy Fieri. Not only is he a spokesperson for the brand, but they have worked together in several campaigns, like “Carnival’s Kids BBQ Challenge” in Texas, the “#thankyouburger” campaign in support of the military and the launch of the “Guy’s Burger Joint” restaurant on board their ships, bringing all the positive associations with the celebrity’s brand into an actual experience for consumers.

Understanding their audience, and the benefits of each channel can help brands craft stronger strategies that will ultimately allow them to engage with their customers and offer them a far more rich and unique shopping experience.

 

You can watch Kathy’s incredibly insightful presentation in the video below.

Marketing To The Senses

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Brands are constantly looking for ways to differentiate themselves, immersive in-store experiences, innovative technology, emotional ads, you name it. Looking to move away from a perspective based solely on the visual element, brands are taking on new approaches that manage to enhance the consumer shopping experience with all the senses.

Sensory marketing goes beyond mere promotional campaigns, the goal is to stimulate emotions and create special moments in order to achieve a better perception from consumers. Making consumers fall in love and engage with brands through all the sense, inviting them to smell, see, taste, feel and listen.

Here’s a great example on how brands can play with our senses to evoke emotions and generate a positive sentiment.

 

 

In sensory marketing, the sense of smell is one of the most powerful ones. Aromas not only get the consumer’s attention, but they generate very strong ties with emotions and memories. Overall, campaigns and communication using the senses can be very powerful, it can influence how consumers feel and help brands generate a strong relationship with them and at the end increase brand loyalty.

The Key is Personalization

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It’s undeniable that digital marketing has become extremely important in the business world, it went from being an additional marketing activity in many companies to even taking the center stage as the main business strategy.  

But to develop successful digital strategies there are many factors to take into account. One aspect that is becoming increasingly important is personalization. Nowadays, consumers who live in the digital environment are constantly bombarded by advertising, brands are everywhere. We see ads on Google, on our feeds in social media, apps, you name it. And one of the biggest challenges for companies is to stand out among the competition and this is exactly what optimization and personalization can help us achieve.

Thanks to many tools that marketers now have available, like marketing automation platforms, this process can be carried out much more easily. Platforms like Hubspot, Hootsuite, Salesforce, to name a few, allows us to make the process of customization possible in a seamless way, from the collection of data to the actual delivery of our message. Having the right tools is not only vital but will directly affect the success of our strategy.

By basing our strategy on our consumers, we are leaving aside the generalized messages about how great our brand is, and focusing on an individualized one, specifically created for our target, depending on their profiles and where they are in the customer journey. Optimization is what’s going to help us get the right message, at the right consumer at the right time.