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Why Can’t Last Click Attribution Tell the True Picture?

As the digital media develops dramatically in the past several years, consumers are now exposed to all kinds of mediums, from social media to digital billboard. For marketers, it is a big challenge to track and tell which moment is the effective moment that forcing the consumers to buy the products. For a very long period, many marketers reply on the Last Click Attribution model to decide which platform is the most useful one. However, this model could be lead us to a completely different direction.

For an instance, one day I was surfing the Instagram, a photo based social media, and found an attractive Ad campaign of Nike new sneakers, which appealed me to know more details of that pair of sneakers. Although on its Instagram photo, it has a shopping link, I am still not used to shop on Instagram. Therefore, one second later, I turned on my laptop and typed in “Nike Sneakers” on Google. The first search result I got was the Google keyword ad that Nike bought. So I clicked that without hesitation, and viewed the information on their official website, and of course bought the sneakers in the end.

Apparently, if imply the Last-Click Attribution model to my journey of purchasing Nike Sneakers, you may find that the Google keywords is the reason leading me to buy the shoes. So, you may think the conversion comes from the Google AdWords campaign. However, the actual effective channel was the Ads on Instagram. Therefore, the last click in this case, is definitely not the right cause to form my shopping decision, so neither should it be credited for the purchase.

Besides the example I came up with above, there are multiple touchpoints could be contributed along the entire customer journey. Sometimes, it needs various ads and promotion to force the consumer to make the final purchase. Therefore, it is better to imply a suitable model based on the previous data collected and real goal of the campaign.

#digitalmarketing #marketing

Subway OOH Ads in the Future

WHAT IS MY IDEA?

If you have taken the subway in Beijing or Shanghai, you must have seen such kind of the subway tunnel ads that the digital images or videos will show up out of the windows when the trains are quickly transporting through the dark tunnels.

This is a Low-Tech called Linear Zoetrope, which has been implemented in the subways of various cities in the US since 1980 - 2011.

However, the technology has been changed a lot nowadays. We have new visual tech such Augmented Reality and VR. So, the subway ads should not be limited to Linear Zoetrope or traditional interior posters any more.

Therefore, my idea is that the subway out-of-home ads could be more in-style by combining the tech of Linear Zoetrope, 3D, Hologram, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality.

HOW MY IDEA WORKS?

My idea could serve for all kinds of brands and companies that want to develop their brand awareness or interaction with their target audience by providing creative and interesting vivid content.

For example, if Warner Bros. Pictures is going to promote the movie Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them to the potential audience in NYC, they could use this platform to incorporate some characters and beasts. When we take the train passing the tunnels between certain stations, we could see the animated characters moving in front of our eyes. In this way, we could watch the trailer in a more vivid way. Of course, we could take a selfie with them, and share it on the personal social media so that more people will know this cool promotion.

What’s more important, it could be imbedded with tiny cookies locating your coordinates and offering you a ticket ordering channel. If you have certain movie or theater apps, they will prompt out telling you the ticket price, screen theater, screen time, and reviews.

Besides movies, any kinds of companies could find and develop their own content to promote their product or services via this platform.

WHY MY IDEA IS BETTER?

Creativity: Integrating multiple technology, more room for innovation;

Effectiveness: Video is more interesting and eye-catching than images. No need to print out so much physical posters.

Engagement: Add an interactive dimension to an already powerful medium - subway.

Meta-Communication: people will record and take pictures and spread the words again and again.

Conversion: the attraction could be direct to real transaction if incorporating more technology.

#subway #out-of-home

Why your Bounce Rate is so High?

When you are managing a Keyword Ad campaign, many marketers would focus on the popular metrics such as Click Through Rate or Conversion Rate, as the important scale to measure the website’s performance. However, it is much more vital to keep an eye on the Bounce Rate, the percent of visitors that leave your website after a quick look without clicking anything else.

Most websites will face a bounce rate between 26 - 70%. No matter lower than 26% or higher 70%, it means that your website must have done something terribly wrong.

In the article of 10 Reasons Your Website Can Have a High Bounce Rate, the author lists 10 possible causes for the high bounce rate. Based on her points, the 10 reasons could be categorized into three parts.

First and foremost, always check your content of the websites. If the content is not good, it won’t probably get you great results. Here are the typical possibilities of the poor content of the websites: 1) Self-Sufficient Content; 2) Low Quality or Under Optimized Content.

Second big part is sometimes more relative to the technology. For example, 1) Your web page may be too slow to load; 2) Different pages are distributed unevenly to your website; 3) Tag/Descriptions are misleading; 4) Tech errors lead to blank page; 5) Other websites have awful backlinks; 6) Your website has single page only, or 7) Your website has poor UX design.

The last part is the incorrect setting of Analytics. Sometimes the marketers just do not set up the Google Analytics correctly, so their bounce rate seems to be odd.

#keywords #search engine optimization #bounce rate #search marketing

Looking Back to the 2016 Election: Email Marketing of Trump VS Hillary

Although the 2016 president election has become a past story, it is still worthwhile to look back and learn some lessons from their digital marketing battle- the fiercest one in the history of the president election. One interesting but niche angle to cut into their campaign would be the email marketing strategy. In order to get the latest updates on their status, I signed up to both of the official websites and received transactional emails from both of them.

The first sight of their welcoming emails could easily tell you how different their strategies are. In the first email from Hillary Clinton, the tone of the email is exactly the same as what Hillary sounds like in the public. After a regular welcome, she pointed out the main focus is to beat her competitor- Donald Trump, and then listed three things her supporters should do: Donate money, To be a volunteer and Spread the words. The main idea of her email is quite short and straightforward without any explanations or powerful slogans. The positive side is that it contains a lot of call-to-actions, no bull-shit; yet the drawback is obvious that you, as a supporter, could not feel anything but bare anger to her competitor and orders from her to do something for her.

(The first welcome email from Hillary Clinton)

However, the email content of Donald Trump showed a bigger picture, which is quite different from what people typically thought of him. First of all, Donald Trump’s team never mentioned a word of “Hillary Clinton” through his email campaign. Instead, he emphasized three things repeatedly that he wanted to achieve: Make the country great again, Bring back American dream, and Reform Washington. Besides, his team showed some vivid examples of the linkage between the small things the supporters could do and the big accomplishment they could achieve together in the end. There is no any direct order to his supporters. If you are his supporter, you might be easily touched by his word such as how hard you guys could make it true together someday or how challenging the road to the White House would be.

(The welcome email from Donald Trump)

In addition to the first emails from both, if we take a wider look at all the emails they sent to the subscribers, can you guess how many times Trump’s team mentioned “Hillary” in the emails and vice versa? The result was shocking due to the fact that Trump’s emails did not mention “Hillary” anything throughout the whole campaign, while 98% of Hillary’s emails directly pointed out the name of “Donald Trump” with a very rude and arrogant tone. Possibly, according to the emails, Hillary Clinton did not get the sense of not abusing someone by saying his name directly.

From analyzing the welcome emails from both politicians, we notice that Trump’s team knows how to approach and give the audience what they want. Contrary to Trump’s actions and words in Twitter, the emails are well-polished, in a sense that gives hope and talks about bringing America together. Hillary, however, was straightforward and simply demanded the audience to donate and support her. In conclusion, Hillary’s team ignored the details in drafting a persuasive and charming email. If this happened twenty years ago, it might have not been an issue, but in the modern digital world where emails and e-messages are consumed by everyone, failing to create a welcome mail is probably a big mistake.

#election 2016 #donald trump #hillary clinton #email marketing #election campaign

Why Marketers Spend More on Email Marketing?

Email is a direct market channel to reach your audience. Compared to other marketing channels such as display ads and social media ads, email is a direct way to share your content with your followers or customers, which helps your message be well delivered. You might say social media such as Instagram and Facebook also target ads and promotions based on a series of algorithms that enables the ads to be more relevant to you. However, no matter how accurate the algorithm is, it is still harder than Email to direct to the right audience.

Since email marketing has higher accuracy and more direct delivery, the open rate which could also be considered as CTR (click through rate) would be higher than other marketing channels. Typically, people sign up for email newsletters only if they are willing to, so they are expecting the coming emails. When they receive the ones that they are highly looking forward, they will have a higher chance to open it. However, all the other marketing channels could only show ads or promotions “unexpectedly” to the target audience. The audience will not know what will show up, and the brands also do not know in what situation their content will be exposed to the audience. In such case, people might ignore the entire content.

Last but not the least, email is more like a “Stock” rather than a “Liquid”. Let’s simply imagine, if you miss some emails once, the emails will not disappear by themselves. Instead, someday when you are clearing up the email box, you would have a chance to look at the previous contents again. However, other marketing channels could not hold their content for a long time. When you miss it, you just miss it. So the email marketing will longer the life of content.

#email marketing #content

Snapchat VS Instagram Stories: How to Leverage them for Marketing

Both Instagram and Snapchat, visual driven social media platforms, have a similar feature called “Stories”- quick photos and videos that only exist for 24 hours. Since the launch of this feature, the two platforms not only appeal to over millions of users, but also provide with a whole new way for marketers to craft the brand stories. So as a young marketer, what are the key skills that we should learn to generate stories on Snapchat and Instagram?

Although Instagram launched the feature of Stories much later than Snapchat, it still attracts the most marketers and becomes the brand favorite. It is possibly because Instagram, an independent social media acquired by Facebook in 2008, already has an enormous user base; it is also because that relying on the algorithm of Facebook, brands on Instagram could reach their target customer more easily. For example, Nike generated 800,000 views in 24 hours for its very first Instagram Story at the first day the feature was released, partly because Nike had already accumulated millions of followers on their Instagram photo page. While on Snapchat, Nike only got 66,000 views for the best video.

But for the users who in favor of Snapchat, they do not care about how large and how smart Instagram stories are. As the major social media apps targets at millennials users, the biggest differentiation of Snapchat is that the fun face filters and geo filters based on the locations. As a brand, in order to catch the focus of those users, you can generate some creative and interesting filters for specific campaigns of events. If your filters are better at the visual design, interaction and creative, the better chance you will get higher exposure.

While the two competitors own their main advantages, basically, the core to create a successful “Stories” is similar. Here are some pro-tips I selected for you. First, “Stories” is a perfect place to deliver special offers for a limited time since it will appear in 24 hours. Second, both could be a suitable platform to show something off the stage such as presenting the raw ideas, and showing the process inside your business. Third, it would be effective if someone (Employees, Stars, Blogger, etc.) takes over the account to form a consistent and complete story. Last but not the least, always remember to add on drawings, stickers, filters, texts to make it fun and links as call-to-action.

How AR could Benefit and Mess up a Video?

Even if you are not a fashionista, you might have heard the runway trend of “See now, buy now”, a new high fashion shopping model led by brands such as Tommy Hilfiger. Since last season, Tommy Hilfiger together with the popular super model Gigi Hadid launched the 2016 Winter and Fall collection. Different from the traditional fashion supply chain that consumers have to wait for 6 months to shop the clothing, Tommy Hilfiger enables the consumers to get immediately when the show released. More than the brick and mortar stores, Tommy also inserted their “See now, buy now” concept to the Video Marketing.

The video ads of Tommy Hilfiger incorporated the AR (Augmented Reality) technology to let you shop the look directly. When you are watching, the models showing up one by one on the runway, you can quickly save the look to your wish list. If you do not want it, you could also remove that look by getting back the video again. Meanwhile, for each look, the small photos of the bloggers or fashion buyers who love this look will pop out on the same screen. When you click their photos, you will be directed to their videos of commentary. So far, you have not leave the original video at all. To put it simple, it is like Video Website, a micro site imbedded within one video.

This video is interactive as the fact that you could click, add and remove items. However, it would be better if you as a viewer could transfer from the video to other alternatives. For example, within the video you could only see what the clothing looks like on the models when they are walking, what if it could show up more introduction and details of the clothing.

Second, it is good to leverage global influencers photos and commentaries in the video. However, it is very annoying if you want to click and go watch everyone’s video. What’s worse, you have to watch from the very beginning of the runway show again if you return from the influencers’ commentary. Therefore, this fancy function only works attractively at the first few seconds. It would be more user friendly if it would show up some her words/comments directly at the screen so that the viewers do not need come and go between the videos.

Please click here to view the video on Tommy Hilfiger official website.

#tommy hilfiger #tommyxgigi #video marketing #augemented reality

Glossier. Young female likes quick online shopping

If you type “Glossier”, an emerging make-up regimen brand created by a group of beauty editors, on Google, you will get their Google search ads on the very top easily. This is a link to the shopping page of their website- the most important window of the brand as they are still digital based cosmetic.

Glossier is a fast-developing make-up brand this year, especially focusing on the young millennial females. When you hit the ads and turn to its landing page, if you are first time here, you can definitely not move your eyes any more.

The color of baby pink and its simple, clean and cute web design will catch your focus immediately. Just similar with their cute packaging and baby pink of the theme color, the brand gets tons of young women interested in through social media and beauty bloggers in a short term. The landing page clearly resonant with the brand image at the very first second, without losing its unique brand identity and core value that girls do not need unnecessary beauty product to waste their time and money.

As a digital based brand, the landing page also successfully serves for the basic need- Shopping, Shopping, Shopping. Since it is the main channel for the brand to get revenue, the landing page did not waste any space for extra content. If you are visiting it for the first time, the large baby pink “sign-up bar” will show up automatically to get you sign up easily. Then, you could quickly find their best-seller products and all the rest in the page. You can smoothly add the items to the shopping bag or select the colors before adding them to the bag. However, none of these clicks will bring you to another new tab or page. In other words, all the actions you hit are still within one web page, which means you could get what you want in a second. Believe it or not, it is the simplest beauty/fashion e-commerce website I have ever seen.

How Empire State Building Tells Brand Story of Love

As a New Yorker, I could not help thinking that how smart the Empire State Building it is to generate different sorts of “content” to maintain its brand image as a symbol of LOVE- the greatest and most common feeling of human beings. Built in 1931, Empire State Building has not been just a regular skyscraper as part of the NYC skyline, but an iconic presence ironed in the hearts of tons of people due to it special meanings for lovers.

In 1933, the movie King Kong selected the Empire State Building to be a significant spot for audience to watch the sad ending of the love between the giant gorilla and the beloved lady Ann. It was the very first image of how Empire State Building could be such a romantic location to the public. 60 years later, in 1993, the famous movie Sleepless in Seattle put the ending in Empire State Building again witnessing the magical union between Sam and Annie. Since then, the fame of Empire State Building goes further along with hundreds of movies and TV shows that made there. In that age, movie has been a quite useful media for the Empire State Building to establish the unique brand story as a symbol of love and romance, while being a part of the movie stories.

As time flies, movie is no longer the only media for Empire State Building to generate new stories of love. Now, Empire State Building leverages event marketing tactics such as holding public weddings or lightening up different colors every day on its body to deepen the meaning of Love. It tries to enrich the stories of love, which is not only an affection between a couple, but also sort of concern to all kinds of public event. For example, in 2015, Empire State Building projected a wildlife documentary on the south face of the building to call people to care about the endangered species and our globe. This is also love in a broader definition. Due to the development of digital media, people around the globe is able to see what the Empire State Building showed before through different kinds of media

With such solid content, the Empire State Building, unlike other skyscrapers around the world, is particularly attractive. However, it can do better by incubating more projects like the one for endangered species, because people would easily get tired to the current light shows if the Empire State Building could not produce new content with higher quality.

#empirestatebuilding #marketing #nyc #storytelling #brand

Digital Marketing, is it better for branding or for direct response?

Digital marketing, compared to the traditional marketing methods, leverages multiple forms of electronic media to perform promotions. It contains the advantages such as cheaper cost and more vivid contents, which is a perfect method for direct response marketing.

Different from traditional media, digital media is more interactive. On major social media, you could post and repost images, videos and texts; on some live channels, you could communicate to mass followers directly; on outdoor digital media, you could touch the screens and click the buttons. All of these interactions would seduce people to respond and take actions, which meets the basic requirement of direct response by providing a platform for call-to-action(CTA). With digital devices, consumers could respond to the promotions quickly. For example, the Interactive Charity Donation Billboard “The Social Swipe” used vivid images to trigger people to swipe their credit cards to donate money. The digital kiosk combining an interactive image and an implemented POS showed us how brilliant the digital marketing could serve for a direct response campaign.

Besides the interaction, most digital media is more trackable and measurable, which is also another key to direct response marketing. For direct response marketing, it is crucial to know exactly where to target before you start, where to optimize during the campaign and what is the conversion rate after. Nowadays, every action of digital marketing could be recorded and analyzed precisely so that you could use the data and metrics to adjust your direct response campaign. For instance, you could insert codes on all the images of the ads displayed online to perform an A/B testing. All the testing is real-time, so you could know which images work better immediately, which will save your time and cost for your direct response campaign.

#digitalmarketing #direct response

Flamingo Lapse #sandiego #flamingo (at Sea World San Diego)

#flamingo #sandiego