Engagement

Of all business videos in 2018, 73% were less than two minutes long, reflecting a 33% drop in length compared to 2017. Countless Digital Marketing studies urged marketers and advertisers to hold their videos to a two-minute maximum because attention spans are shrinking. Studies even showed that two minutes was the magic number—the length of time most likely to evoke the highest engagement. But the pendulum is swinging, and, frankly, those studies were overhyped. The content should dictate the length, not some arbitrary…

Google Cloud named the Official Cloud Partner and Official Cloud Data and Analytics Partner of Major League Baseball Google and Major League Baseball (MLB) announced a powerful multi-year collaboration to upgrade MLB's business processes and  support next-level experiences that inspire fans around the world. Google Cloud will become MLB's Official Cloud and Cloud Data and Analytics partner, with MLB's business operations, including Statcast—the automated tool for analyzing player movements and abilities—now running on…

Company to showcase its industry-leading platform at Convenience Retailing University Punchh, the leader in customer loyalty and engagement solutions for physical retailers, today announced its participation at Convenience Retailing University (CRU), February 18-19, 2020 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Company will showcase its industry-leading loyalty platform at booth #506 as it continues to drive customer engagement for convenience store retailers nationwide. Ahead of CRU, Punchh kicked off its partnership with Casey’s…

Branded Mobile Apps are Becoming Essential for Merchants. Here’s How to Optimize the Lifecycle Experience Using a Holistic, Data-Driven Approach  As it turns out, customers are even more fickle on their smartphones than they are in your store. According to a recent e-commerce app benchmark study by CleverTap, only 14.65% of users stay with a downloaded e-commerce app after thirty days. One-fourth of all apps are used only once before being discarded; furthermore, Gartner predicted in its study that less than 0.01% of all…

Practically every Marketing department uses Video to deliver the brand message. But are your Videos performing? Are they optimized for engagement, sharing, and conversion? It’s easy to create Video content these days. Anyone can do it with a smartphone and an editing suite like Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, or the plethora of iOS and Android video editors designed for editing on the fly. But: Is your content really delivering the message? Is it showing your brand in the best possible light? Are you optimizing format,…

Social Fatigue. It’s becoming very real. In the B2C and B2B world, both consumers and marketers are at a point of exhaustion. There is currently more content than eyeballs across every major social platform and we have all seen those crazy statistics about how much video is uploaded to YouTube per day. How can anyone realistically keep up with that? Outside of savvy audiences knowing exactly how to opt-in to the right cadence and clients for intel, the rest of the public needs the platform to curate and/or algorithmically…

Customer experiences both online and in-person can, and should, be highly personalized to maximize return and boost loyalty, but only when done in a thoughtful and relevant way. If you’re not providing the correct context for personalized experiences, one mistake can risk losing a customer forever, and hence the relationship you’ve worked so hard to create. Let’s explore Personalization done right. Make it individualized and consider your messaging carefully When it comes to tailoring your customer experiences the key is…

Marketing Technology is now the largest portion of the total Marketing budget (29% on average according to Gartner). Most Marketing stacks consist of technology partners that fall into categories such as CRM, AdTech, Insights and Analysis, Experience Optimization, and SEO. The stack can often help in three ways: 1) attracting customers, 2) engaging customers, and 3) analysis/optimization. But, this is where marketers need to hit pause. All too often, they become enamored with the attraction and analysis part and put…

Are trade shows and conferences becoming a waste of time? There are over 1.8 million conferences, incentive events and other meetings in the US alone, according to the Events Industry Council. They are a great way to introduce new employees to an industry and they offer those established in the industry a stage for their expertise. And, let’s face it, there’s no substitute for expos like the Consumer Electronics Show for seeing the latest new products up close and personal. And yet, the frequency with which I hear busy…

Every marketer strives to create a funnel that runs smoothly. After all, their investment of time and money to build funnels that attract, nurture, qualify, and convert leads to customers should deliver high ROI. The reality, however, is that few marketers have funnels that perform flawlessly, even some of the time. There is almost always some “friction” in the funnel that limits or prohibits the free flow of leads from attraction to engagement to conversion. Of course, most marketers would agree that it’s easier to…

During my two decades of PR and communications, much of which has been spent working with publishers and ad tech companies, I’ve never encountered a topic that sends clients running quite the way that privacy can today. It’s become our industry’s plutonium: handle it only if you must. But do so gently, and get away as quickly as you can. I spend a lot of time talking to companies about privacy. The unfortunate reality is that our industry has come to view this topic from a narrow PR perspective - as one to be managed—if…

The longest-running American TV game show host Bob Barker once said, "You can't fool television viewers with dancing girls and flashing lights.” The same mindset goes with prospects. The smoke and mirrors show won’t get you far when potential customers decide on who to pick when they come down to price. This is the fork in the road for every software company ready to sell their service or product. With the goal of getting on the right path to revenue, SaaS organizations are often thrown into a debacle of what pricing model…

Videos have become ubiquitous in the Digital Marketing industry. Whether it’s on a desktop or a mobile phone, there’s a chance of seeing at least one video on our feed. Since gaining its popularity, videos have made its way into many platforms in one way or the other through live streaming, long-form content, and ephemeral snippets just to name a few. When it became clear that the video was here to stay, many social media platforms have been quick to adjust to the change. The likes of Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube…

A couple of weeks back, our team analyzed how quickly a bank resolved customers’ requests across geographies. It turned out to be a hefty report with lots of numbers, some filler, dense text, business terms, a few insights, and even more filler. You see, the insights were the most critical part of the report. But, they were lost in the massive report – like a needle in a haystack. No wonder the client took an entire week to understand and respond to it. After his suggestions, we found a few more insights. But, we didn’t want…

Adopting a dedicated account-based Event Marketing strategy offers a number of benefits for marketers. The event itself will target potential long-term customers, the Event Marketing efforts will focus on accounts that matter and marketers will be able to produce an event with confidence it will lead to a positive ROI. Of course, to realize all these benefits, there must be an organization-wide stakeholder buy-in on the Account-Based Marketing (ABM) event approach. What is ABM? The ABM concept has been around since the…

It should come as no surprise that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being applied to almost every use and application of data imaginable. The sheer fact is there’s so much data at our fingertips that we need machines to do the heavy lifting of analysis in order to apply effective learnings and make informed data-driven decisions. This couldn’t be truer than in the case of email inbox filtering to combat abuse as fifteen years ago, spam and phish outnumbered legitimate emails in our inbox. The job of protecting recipients…

I’ve been keeping my ear out for the song of the summer. It’s gotta be a song with that hook, the beat, and becomes an earworm before you know it. Though jamming to Lil Nas X or the Jonas Brothers is not just a summer activity. U.S. adults spend more time listening to digital audio than browsing on social media. With 204 million digital audio listeners in the U.S. or nearly 2/3 of all digital media consumers, digital audio is the second most popular digital activity (based on time spent) for U.S. adults (behind the video).…

Facebook is the dominant platform for social media marketing for multi-location businesses, and the platform continues to add to its list of localized social marketing features. Data from SOCi’s social media and reputation management platform — in addition to third-party research reports — can help marketers understand why Facebook is the platform to focus on moving forward. Among multi-location brands, Facebook has 3x the number of profiles and pages under management within the SOCi platform than are on Google My…

In the ever-changing world of social media, the main platforms continually vie for the greatest share of our time and money, evolving new ways to help us maximize our businesses and earning potential. As any self-respecting blogger or marketer will know, one of the key players in recent years has been Pinterest, whose website tagline ‘Find new ideas to try’ captures this concept perfectly. “Oft-touted as the ‘second-largest search engine after Google’ (though YouTube may have something to say about that), the simplicity of…

New screen-reading functionality and accessibility checks ensure inclusive email design Litmus, a leader in email marketing and analytics, announced new accessibility testing features, including the ability to hear an audio recording of how an email will be read by a screen reader. Litmus is the only email testing platform that provides these audio previews, making the company's accessibility preview checks the most complete and comprehensive solution available globally.…