Industry Insights
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QR Codes: Are They Back for Real This Time?
Pulse April 6, 2022QR Codes are an extension of the barcode, and were first introduced as a way for manufacturers to scan larger amounts of data quickly. By 2011, retailers and trade shows were able to take advantage of smartphone technology to utilize QR codes in their inventories, badging, and check-ins — and slowly there emerged consumer usage in the form of online offers.
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SEO for the Future: To Keyword Clusters, and Beyond
Pulse April 6, 2022SEO was a lot simpler in a less-crowded marketplace; you could optimize by keyword for your product, industry, or customer demographics and watch your traffic grow. In 2021, however, not only is the online space left with little metaphorical keyword elbow room, but search engines have gotten smarter to keep up with consumer demand.
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4 E-commerce Advertising Trends to Watch
Leading Edge April 4, 2022As the endemic consumer is rapidly changing, modern brands seek to leverage all of the tactics at their disposal to engage customers. One of the trends we’ve seen over the past two years is a drastic rise in e-commerce and social commerce utilization across retail and direct to consumer brands. As e-commerce continues to take over the marketplace, brand marketing teams will need to better understand the buyer journey in the modern consumer experience-centric era.
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7 Marketing Strategies to Boost Conversions & Average Order Value
Leading Edge April 4, 2022As more customers flock to social media to discover the next big trend, research future purchases, and engage with influencer content, brands have become savvy at meshing their content into our daily digital lives. And with so many options to choose from, customers have grown increasingly fond of the brands that give them new and convenient ways to buy their products, which is why more and more companies are offering a Buy Now, Pay Later across their digital platforms.
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Engaging Gen Z with Empathy
Leading Edge April 4, 2022The past two years have had a dramatic impact on consumer behavior. New cultural phenomena like pandemic exhaustion, digital inspiration, and ethical online shopping have forced brands to quickly adapt to the changing dynamics — and leading the charge is a growing market of young, empathy-driven buyers.
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Top Mobile Marketing Strategies for Success in 2022
Leading Edge April 4, 2022The World Advertising Research Center (WARC) predicts that by 2025, 73 percent of people around the globe will rely solely on their smartphones to access the internet. With this forecast in mind, it’s clear that brands and businesses should be incorporating as many mobile touchpoints as possible into their digital marketing strategies.
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What the Metaverse Means for the Future of Marketing
Leading Edge April 4, 2022The metaverse is all about bringing customer experience to the forefront of marketing in a whole new way. The pandemic gave way to a boom in virtual shopping methodologies, and the response of the consumer market speaks well to the future possibilities of marketing in the metaverse.
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Why Radio Is the Ideal Place to Share Brand Stories
Leading Edge March 29, 2022Consumers have strong expectations that the brands they choose both support and align with the values that are important to them. Recognizing what drives consumers, brands are laser-focused on living their mission, principles, and ethics. As such, brands market their products and services grounded in that mission and the shared values and beliefs between the brand and its target customers.
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Is It Live, or Is It an Infomercial?
Pulse March 25, 2022The COVID-19 pandemic and the quarantines that followed quickly changed the way brands could sell and show off their products, fostering a need for marketers to get inventive with their tactics. The online space also evolved during this time, becoming increasingly dominant and the perfect place to welcome creativity beyond banner ads, video, and social posts. Enter livestreaming, a tactic already well established by gamers and other communities as a way to connect with one another in real-time. What better way for marketers to connect with consumers with so many traditional methods inaccessible for the foreseeable future? Similar to a television informercial or home shopping network, livestreaming offers all of the benefits of those models but cuts out production costs and call-center intermediaries. While brand livestreaming is mainly centered in Asia at the moment, there is a huge opportunity and an eager audience ready for marketers to connect with everywhere else. Read on for more information about the livestreaming trend, how to do it, and what other brands have done in this space.
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What the C-Suite Needs to Know About ABM
Leading Edge March 25, 2022The buzz in sales and marketing circles around account-based marketing (ABM) refuses to die. And with good reason, because ABM works. A full 87 percent of B2B marketers surveyed by ITSMA reported that the ROI from their ABM initiatives outperformed their other marketing investments, and companies are seeing three times higher win rates with larger average deal sizes (91 percent of companies reported increases in average deal sizes with 25 percent seeing average increases of over 50 percent) when using ABM.
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A $340 Billion Industry Is Ripe For Disruption with the Metaverse
Leading Edge March 24, 2022Technology has empowered us to achieve so much more — to do things that could not be imagined before. And still, one thing that has not changed is the dread we experience when we enter the world of customer service.
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Half-Human, Half-Machine, All Marketing: Managing Algorithmic Limitations
Pulse March 24, 2022When AI-based algorithms were introduced to the marketing world they were an immense game changer: they upped the ante on how brands could target their existing audiences, and they sped up the process of understanding how to build new ones. As machine learning grew exponentially, however, it also lost much of its human touch. Without a balance of human input and safety checks, algorithms can adopt human biases (including hate speech), and cannot adapt fast enough to real-time crises like COVID-19. The resources here discuss how marketers can best work with algorithms to ensure they reach desired targets with efficient, optimized results, and avoid communicating the wrong messages.
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'What They Said' at the ANA In-House Agency Conference
Leading Edge March 18, 2022ANA just concluded our 2022 In-House Conference. The following provides great quotes and insights from some of the conference speakers (in order of appearance).
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Consumers Seek Greater Control Over How Marketing Offers are Communicated
Ethics Issue Alerts March 17, 2022As we move toward a new normal, there are shifts in behaviors and trends in how and where we work and live and do business. Part of the consumers’ focus on data and privacy issues includes seeking greater control on how marketing offers are being communicated in promotional mail and online display ads.
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Industry Leaders Reflect on Brand Purpose as a Competitive Advantage
Pulse March 17, 2022We might sometimes be tempted to think of brand purpose as something that organizations pursue strictly out of altruistic motives. However, the power of brand purpose lies in its ability to drive all aspects of a business and galvanize the workplace.
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5 Behavioral Science Tips That Boost E-Commerce Conversions
Leading Edge March 16, 2022E-commerce brands often spend substantial resources on ads to drive website traffic, but rarely optimize conversion rates enough to turn increased traffic into sales.
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Brands Must Work to Unify Identity Data to Create a Single Customer View
Leading Edge March 16, 2022Marketers are about to feel the effects of third-party cookie loss and mobile ad id depreciation in an entirely new way. As brands embraced identity as a new targeting option, third party data has acted as the “glue” between sets of first party data. A marketer typically doesn’t house every insight about an individual in a single database and works with a variety of partners and providers. Third-party data knits these disparate insights together.
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Who's on First? Party Data Efficiency in the Wake of the Cookie's Demise
Pulse March 16, 2022As the news of the cookie’s so-called demise has spread far and wide (and we’ve previously discussed here), there have been a number of potential strategies laid out for marketers looking to navigate this brave new world. While further leveraging influencers or re-designing loyalty programs have emerged as two possibilities, we’ve also witnessed a natural tendency to focus on party data above all. This makes sense, as it’s the “death” of third-party data (in reality, privacy regulation barriers) that prompted a re-examination of how to properly use consumer data in the first place. Enter (or, re-enter, as it may be) first- and zero-party data, best explained by this chart from Cheetah Digital:
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A New Framework to Define and Measure a Brand’s Ingenuity
Leading Edge March 15, 2022Leaders know that innovation is vital to success. But what does this frequently-used term really mean today — and why does how you define it matter? Answering this question is an urgent need for businesses seeking to drive new solutions amid the significant challenges the world faces today, from climate change and inequality to pandemic recovery and geopolitical instability. A meaningful understanding of innovation helps inform a brand’s vision, which is the foundation for brand health and performance.
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How Agencies and Marketers Can Optimize Local CTV & OTT Advertising
Leading Edge March 15, 2022In this in-depth Q&A, David Buonfiglio, VP, Digital, TVB discusses local CTV and OTT advertising strategies with Jenn Scilabro, SVP, Digital Sales, Nexstar Digital. From optimizing digital and linear media mixes to measurement and fraud, Jenn shares Nexstar Digital’s current and future vision.
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