Unless you have been living under a (digital) rock, you would have heard about the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook incident. As individuals, we woke up to the new era of cyber crime. People aren’t calling it a ‘crime’ yet as they don’t know how it is affecting them as individuals. As a digital marketer, our first question was if this was going to snowball into something much bigger affecting our professional lives. After all, Facebook has one of the most effective marketing tools in the industry and also has Instagram and Whatsapp under its belt. If it changes its rules, it affects us all. Let’s not have any misinterpretation here. There has been no breach of data. It wasn’t ‘stolen’ either. Facebook, at that point, legally allowed people to mine this data for their profits. To companies like Google and Facebook, we, the people, are their biggest commodity and currency. At some point, they ‘sold’ us like cattle to the people who had the programming skills to seek us out. As they say, “If you are not buying the product, YOU are the product.” The problem is there are many missing links that don’t allow us to fully decode the problem. Why did Facebook knowingly allow something like this to happen? To what extent does Facebook really know about us? What data do they reveal and what do they hide? Here’s a quick video on finding out what Facebook knows about you and how you can change settings But that only reveals what Facebook is willing to disclose to us. There is a lot more going on behind the screens that we don’t know about. Did you know that the algorithm can make an educated guess about things like your ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age and gender – all just from your Facebook likes! The facial recognition algorithm may detect everything from sexual orientation to protesters even if their faces are partially concealed. It’s just scary to know that Facebook knows more about you than probably anyone else in the world. All those years of likes and shares and friendships and photos are all there – accessible to the highest bidder! Have a look at this TED video According to the latest reports, Analytica has received a notice to disclose its activity in India. The notice not only demands this information but also threatens grand scale action, if any illegal activity is found. On the other hand, brands from India like Nestle and ITC who heavily rely on Facebook advertising are writing to Facebook if their position as a brand has been compromised by this breach. The whole activity comes as a wake-up call to all of us. We’ve been pegging machine learning and artificial intelligence as the next best thing happening to us. But will it come at the cost of our freedom? Will it come with the caveat of third-party companies knowing the most intimate details of our lives so that they can market to us? There are people in the seats of power, using data to know us, judge us and nudge us to make decisions about not just products but about life in general. Ajit Ranade writes in his Mumbai Mirror column about the research from Stanford and Cambridge Universities who have created a forecasting model based on our Facebook likes. Just 150 likes data is enough for them to know more about you than your family. 300 likes they probably know more about you than your spouse. As digital marketers, we’ve often resorted to collecting this data for accurate ad targeting. For example, in a recent campaign, we could target students of a particular college doing a particular course and having specific interests. To some extent, people have been surprised by how accurate the targeting has been. But the surprise is slowly turning to shock knowing how much of your digital personality hangs out there for someone to manipulate you. If your Facebook data is merged with your shopping and financial data, credit history, political preferences and personal biases, will there be anything stopping a clever manipulator to directly manipulate you from your very own phone screen without you even knowing it? The topic is far from over. In fact, what we’ve uncovered is just the tip of the Zuckerberg. If there are implications, these will affect our professional lives for sure. Here’s hoping that it is another step in creating a positive digital economy.
Author: meenaxi.badola@justwords.in
How Fitness and Wellness Brands Are Using Social Media Content to Build Communities
When was the last time you tried to lose weight? Well… I started this great new program yesterday, fully enthusiastic that this was going to be ‘the’ life-altering thing I was looking for – you know, the kinds where you lose 10 kgs in 10 days and everybody is going gaga about it with the before-after photos? That program lasted until yesterday afternoon when I succumbed to the temptation of a sizzling chocolate brownie (with an extra scoop of ice cream). Fret not, there is another Facebook group, another fitness app or a new diet program waiting for me. Behind each of these programs are the people who form their community – the true force that manages to catch my attention with their stories and influence my decision on the next trial. A community is the ‘in thing’ in digital. People who can influence and wield power over a virtual group of individuals now have the power to rule the (sizeable part of their) world. Keeping this in mind, a lot of fitness brands are turning to build their community to help their own brand grow. There are many advantages to having a community following if you are a fitness brand. One the most important factors is that it gives people the validation to join your community. If there are many people there and a sizeable number of them seem to be vouching for your solution, the likelihood of someone considering your product, services of methods are quite high. Next, you have a ready audience for running experiments. New launches, new services will all be lapped up by an internal community before you look outside for validation. Last but not the least, you have a group of people vested in your product. Some people may start out in the free category but may move to paid services if you are persuasive. New prospects, leads, sales, engagement – all the things you need online exists in communities. If it sounds harder than it looks, well, it is. Want to know how the experts are doing it? We bring to you some of the latest brands from the fitness industry that are doing he heavy lifting on community building and reaping the rewards. Fitternity Heard about the Zomato for fitness? Well, here it is. With over 65,000 active users, Fitternity provides curated information about all the fitness options near you. They have well over 8000 listings from Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, and Bengaluru of trusted fitness options close to you. Fitternity exists to solve multiple problems for its community. First, it curates and provides information on the fitness solutions close to you. Second, it creates an offline connect option for you. For example, you can search specifically for Marathon training and the site will show you a list that you wouldn’t discover otherwise if you are a newbie. Lastly, it provides some interesting reads to help your body, mind and soul stay fit. From diet recipes to fat shaming to inspirational stories, this is one power packed website that is well worth your attention. So why should you look it up? Fitternity extends some great benefits like memberships with the lowest price guarantee, bookings for single activities, unlimited trials and an app that’ll help you stay fit on the go. Best of it all is that information offered is credible, unlike the magical weight loss pill you’ll find online. Fitternity also makes interesting use of its social channels to build its community. It uses channels to give informed answers to generic questions like ‘Can yoga help me get toned?’ or ‘How to become a morning person’. It doesn’t take long for their Insta followers to join their core community as there is a steady dose of motivation and discounts at the end of the rainbow. One of the interesting things they do to grab new users is to ask existing users to nominate their friends to take the #PledgeForFitness on Insta. They also tied the whole thing up with a social cause and themselves pledged 25% of the proceeds to a charity. GetActive If you want to truly see the power of a community movement, GetActive is a great example from the emerging India of today where people have begun to accept fitness as a way of life. Extending a gamified platform to employees within a company, GetActive has more than 50 companies extending its services including the likes of Cisco, IBM and Microsoft. GetActive gamifies the whole fitness calendar for an employee, collecting their fitness data, getting timely intervention from nutritionists and doctors and engaging the whole organisation where the employees compete with each other to get higher on the fitness chart. The result? Numbers seem to speak for themselves. 67% employees formed a permanent changed towards a healthier lifestyle which reduced stress levels by 80% and sick leaves by 4 days. Other things like high energy, good sleep, weight loss will make happier employees. You know where that leads, right? So, you see, GetActive didn’t take the traditional route with tried and tested social platforms. Instead, it created its own social platform where the interaction and engagement rates are increasing at an enviable rate. Zumba If you are into the process of getting fit or losing weight, you should have definitely heard about Zumba. With a little J Lo party beats here and some rap music on the side, Zumba believes in partying your way into fitness. How cool does that sound! Zumba’s overall strategy is to build its community both online and offline and social media is used as a key tool to spread the word. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that you’ll find a Zumba class near you. After all 12 million people take Zumba classes every week at more than 110,000 locations in 125 countries. The interesting fact is that 62% of Zumba’s page views are driven by women. So 70% of its audience on Facebook are female. The community interaction looks encouraging. Of the
Should you use ChatBots for your small business?
Are you a small business trying to get your leg up on the competition? Do you belong to that pool of businesses that have limited resources but an unlimited fire to provide superlative customer experience? Are you one of those enterprises doing well with regards to generating awareness & interest for their products or services online, but facing an overwhelming situation with insufficient bandwidth to service the leads? If the answer to any of the above is yes, chatbots are your calling. What exactly are chatbots? via GIPHY The Chatbots Magazine defines chatbot as “a service, powered by rules and sometimes artificial intelligence that enables one to interact with and via a chat interface. The service could be any number of things, ranging from functional to fun, and it could live in any major chat product (Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram, Text Messages, etc.).” If I have to explain very simply, a chatbot is a computer program that can emulate a human conversation with some pre-assigned instructions. These programs aren’t particularly a new invention, but the last couple of years with rising trends of artificial intelligence have ushered a wave that has made them far simpler, more efficient and cost-effective than you could have imagined earlier. Here Are 3 Sure Shot Ways How Chatbot Can Help Your Small Business – 1. Ensure Prompt Communication A prompt response never goes unappreciated. There was a research study published in The Chatbot Report that concluded about 43 percent consumers viewed a business having chatbots as innovative, whereas 22 percent felt that the company was more efficient. Chatbot as an instrument helps to give out instantaneous replies and also communicate new developments with customers. This is a good way to build a positive image and also share latest developments at a negligible cost. 2. Attend Customer Queries Customers are already acquainted with interacting with automated voice systems and emails. In that sense, chatbots are an intuitive alternative. Assigning the task of answering queries to an individual puts a limitation on the number of possible questions answered and people attended to. Automating the procedure with a bot multiplies the serviceable quantum possible. It’s a way more efficient mechanism to respond to frequently asked questions. The comfort it offers is immense even to the customer since the bot is available 24×7 and the Enquirer doesn’t have to talk to a real person if he or she doesn’t want to. 3. Gather Customer Insight The best way to improvise on any kind of offering is to step into the customer’s shoes and assess from their viewpoint. In the present age of technology, data is a very powerful and reliable way to capture customer insight. As a company with limited amount of resources for research, chatbots can serve as an excellent way to collect information. They can be designed to get answers to multiple-choice questions in a quick & non-intrusive way as compared to individual representatives chasing feedback from customers. Words Of Caution ChatBots are beyond doubt, a great element to add to your marketing arsenal. However, it’s essential you exercise some caution & use them mindfully. Here are some don’ts to keep in mind with regards to using chatbots. 1. Never work without a strategy It is essential to acknowledge that no technology works without a strategy. A bot should not be the sole navigator of your customer communication. It can almost never happen that a single channel can simply cater to the interests of the entire target group. 2. Technical glitches are not impossible No technology is glitch-proof. There’s always a chance of a breakdown or technical issue arising. It’s important to be alert and responsive to the same. It’s also a good idea to have a stringent testing mechanism, in the beginning, to observe how the bot is responding to different kinds of questions. Being cautious beforehand can keep problems from arising at bay. 3. Don’t consider human resources as fully replaceable Lastly, it’s also imperative to realize chatbots are a great way to supplement your human communication but not replace it. Bots are efficient, cheap and very useful. However, they can’t completely take over your talented marketing and sales team. They can’t come up with innovative ideas or adapt their responses and behavior based on customer sentiments. The human touch in many cases is irreplaceable. It’s fair if you have initial hiccups with regards to the technical implementation of a bot for your business. However, you’ll be happy to learn they’re really simple to create and streamline your marketing endeavors. There are many online platforms available that can help you create one without any knowledge of programming. Each come with a series of simple steps you need to follow depending on the tool you choose. Following the same your bot gets ready within a few minutes only. It’s a good idea, to begin with a basic bot and take it forward from there. If implemented properly, they can really turn out to be a savior. Some popular tools to build your own bot include – Chatfuel It is particularly helpful to create a bot for Facebook Messenger without any coding development knowledge. It allows you to customize the bot’s response by adding content by means of simple hyperlinking. Flow Xo This tool can be used to create bots starting from a very basic one to a fully hybrid human bot. It offers extreme flexibility in terms of process and options. ChattyPeople It is one of the simplest platforms available to create a bot. In addition to its speciality in creating bots for Facebook Messenger, it also allows you to integrate the bot with popular ecommerce platforms like Shopify. MEOKAY The USP of this platform lies in creating conversational bots. It supports in mimicking a remarkable human to human touch in the conversation.
What You Should Know About The New Facebook Feed Algorithm Update
Online marketers often find themselves to be puppets at the hands of a few internet giants who push and sway the everyday workings of each algorithm update. Though companies like Google and Facebook are known to update their algorithms frequently, most of it goes unnoticed by the crowd in general. That happens until there is an ‘announced’ update which sends us marketers scurrying back to our digital drawing boards to wonder how we should react to it, what we should be telling our clients and how our well-calculated strategy for the year will get affected. The latest among these announced updates came from Facebook this January when Mark Zuckerberg announced that there would be lesser brand updates on the Facebook feed. It was a way to say that their users came first. What does this update really mean? Let’s interpret a few essential sections from this update. 1. “The new algorithm will emphasize posts from friends and family over viral videos and clickbait headlines from Pages.” Remember that news item about “19 hilarious proposal fails of all times” stories that pop up on your feed? People seem to love it… a lot! Looks like some people may be complaining too (or so Facebook says). So if you don’t like such stuff much, there is a lesser chance you’ll see it in your feed. 2. “… recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content – posts from businesses, brands and media – is crowding out the personal moments.” Because and so-called click-bait posts worked, they started increasing in numbers. The reality is that our Facebook feed is easily filled with them since we tend to click such articles frequently. Eventually, the algorithm went to the extent of prioritizing these posts instead of those from friends and family. This meant that the power of content marketing raised its ugly head and started eating into Facebook’s revenues. Brands with inherently viral content started getting more eyeballs for free. Facebook decided to intervene to ensure that the balance was maintained and brands are forced to pay for getting their content visible. 3. “I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.” Marketers can read between the lines. It means that you’ll have to work much harder if you have to get your brand content out organically. Otherwise, you can pay to find your way into your customer’s feed. How will a user’s news feed be affected? The statement provided by Zuckerberg can be best described as murky. It talks about “helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.” Content cannot be meaningful without being relevant. But generic content can be relevant without being meaningful. So how exactly will Facebook’s ‘brain’ know what an individual finds relevant or meaningful? Let’s see you see an interesting DIY video. You watch the entire video and then move on. But if I don’t like, share or comment, Facebook may think that this video isn’t ‘relevant’. So even if you like to watch a certain type of video, your interaction will be key determining factor. We don’t like, comment or share everything we see so determining relevancy becomes a tricky business. What does this mean for your Facebook strategy? Facebook started its journey by encouraging people to accrue a ‘fan following’. When it realised that the power was slipping out of its hands because brands could directly talk to their community by being in their news feed, it started imposing algorithmic restrictions. Brands eventually had to pay to ensure that they could get a slice of their OWN followers’ attention. Today, when you choose to ‘boost’ you post, one of the clear options is ‘People who like your page’. This means that the number of followers took a back seat and engagement was put as the connecting metric between users and brands. This announcement from Facebook may try to put up a users-first ideology but if you read between the lines, all Facebook is doing is what it has done before. It is restricting a brand’s organic reach and pushing brands to pay to get user attention. Organic viral content may not be the key to trend on Facebook and, good ol’ money will do the talkin. For now, brands will probably continue to look for the next jugaad to circumvent such policies. Until there, here’s to optimizing campaigns, generating leads and tracking conversions. Want to read more check the curated list below. 5 top trends that are likely to be adopted for social media in 2018 Move over blogs, articles. Here are new content formats to consider 5 Indian Tech Companies Mastering The Art Of Content How To Start Your First Content Marketing Campaign: The 5 Must-Do Steps
5 top trends that are likely to be adopted for social media
We’ve reached a stage of online evolution where brands cannot afford to miss out on social chatter. You’ll see many doing the mandatory routine of posting on various social channels every day. The other end of the spectrum showcases case studies where brands are unlocking the true potential of social and becoming trailblazers for others. In a constantly changing scenario, it is difficult to differentiate between fads and trends. Every other day there is a new report on what brands must be doing, or not doing, on social. As online marketers, we are all too eager to experiment with what can work for our brand. With all the experiments we did through 2017, we discovered a few trends that are most likely to be adopted by social players in 2018. 1. Connecting social metrics to business outcomes When social media, and by that, we mean Facebook, took off, the biggest currencies that brands wanted to own was ‘fans’. Fast forward to 2017, everyone was talking about measuring engagement. Companies, especially popular ones, were spending millions to engage with their customers, connect and communicate with them directly. But was this translating to increase in business? In some cases, yes. But there isn’t a foolproof way to measure this for many brands who are into the service business or B2B sales. Social still is an indispensable part of digital. But companies are now demanding accountability from the dollars spent on social i.e. there is more emphasis on ‘Social ROI’. There is a lot social can do for a company. It can reduce customer service costs, attract talent, showcase product offerings and be used to narrate stories. But it is important to connect these aspects with business goals. How to work on your social ROI: Decide what business goal your social campaign will be aligned to. Then pick out the activities you can measure. From event attendance to direct sales, create your campaign keeping in mind how the outcomes will effect the business. Of course, engagement, following and traffic can be metrics that can be additional frills. 2. Move from being a publisher to broadcaster In the last couple of years, video took over all other forms of online content. The consumption on video within social feeds has also exploded. Because of this brands are slowly moving from being publishers to broadcasters of TV-style program. The advantage of such content is that it allows brands to use the power of storytelling (link) to help customers connect with them. Stories are the age old way that humans use to remember details associated with an event or thing. When brands use stories, they manage to engage customers with an emotional connect. It allows them to propagate benefits more than features. It is also true that not all companies can be broadcasters and this isn’t a one size fits all. How can you make broadcasting work for you: Both Facebook and Twitter offer Live videos. On the surface, this, in itself, is a great opportunity for brands to create a hype around short events. Once this is done, Facebook live videos are indexed by Google too. With the right keywords, the videos can continue to drive incremental views. 3. Rise of the planet of influencers Today is the LAST day to get your hands on the OnePlus 5T! Quickly follow @oneplus_india right now to be eligible! Tag your friends and share the love ❤️ Though customers subscribe to brands on social, they still consider social messages to be a type of advertising. To circumvent this problem, brands are now making use of social influencers. These influencers build a community and gather a following based on their profession, lifestyle and preferences. Now, when they subtly mention a brand or product without the overkill of an ad, it leaves an impression in the mind of the consumer without them even realizing it. Influencers aren’t just the ones that have a community following. They can be peers who have left the old ‘word of mouth’ technique and instead use social platforms to voice their opinion on products and services. In 2018, brands will need to work to identify such influencers and make sure they don’t do an ‘ad’ but a PR like promotion. How can you use influencer marketing this year: Find a way to identify influencers across a spectrum of community builders, customers, and even employees. Then work towards connecting your influencer campaigns with business goal metrics. Currently, influencers tend to promise eyeballs, traffic and brand mentions. But it is also important to analyse how these eventually connect with overarching business goals. Get a mix of social and Artificial Intelligence Ever since the discovery of AI, it has been propagated that it will take away human jobs. But the core part of an AI strategy has always been about being as close as possible to their human counterpart. There is a lot of discussion on how AI and machine learning will impact the future of digital. While things are a little unclear on this, you can go with tried and tested AI techniques for your social experiments. How to use AI with social Here are a few scenarios where you can mix social and AI: First level customer care with AI bots: Allowing intelligent AI systems to take on your first level of customer service may just be the thing needed to help your customer service executives improve their service levels. Serving content: Once you discover what content your consumer likes, use AI and retargeting give them even more content to binge on. Analytics: Facebook is using new predictive analytics to help customers discover insights faster. You too can leverage AI to gain insights before it is actually executed. Deriving insights from social data Brands will notice that each social platform gives out tons of data about customer interaction. From social mentions to comments, social data is valuable. But brands are still wondering how to connect the
Move over blogs, and articles. Here are new content formats to consider
The content marketing game is changing slowly but steadily. There are still hordes of blogs and content produced in the world but only a minuscule percentage of it manages to catch our attention, resonate, or go viral. While you may already have a solid content plan charted out for 2018, have you stopped to wonder how it is different from your 2017 plan? Have you factored innovative forms of content presentation into your strategy? If not, this is a great time to modify your plan a bit. There are two aspects to this plan: a. Great Content While we can’t fit in a universal definition for ‘great’, we all know that it is the type we all like to read with a cup of coffee, right until the end. It is filled with, data, insights, nuggets of wisdom, a-ha moments and the magical touch of humour. All of it together makes you believe that the piece was not written generally but somehow targeted at you. As far as this bit goes, nothing has changed. You still need to sweat it out, collect data, type, edit and then type some more until you get the desired result. b. Great Presentation We’ve spoken at length about the importance of imagery and the use of infographics before but the way we present content now is changing. It is not just headlines, text and images with highlights for quick scrollers. It is interactive and truly engaging where the user dictates how they want to proceed with the narrative. In this type of content presentation, the images literally bring the story to life helping you better imagine or understand the conversation in context. Going forward in 2018, your regular blogs must have great content but once in a few months, you’ll have to pull a rabbit out of the hat and create a mix of great content and great presentation. This will require everyone from a graphic designer to an animation specialist to a big data wiz to an expert wordsmith to come together and create a masterpiece. Are you up for the challenge? Here are bold new things to try out in 2018 1. Interactive Design We know that Parallax design has been around for a few years now. Yet, we see very little of it used for designing blog content. The fact is that you can package your content so well within the design that your readers would live to scroll until the end without feeling text-heavy. The the example of rehabs.com who created a page on the effect of illicit drugs on America. You can click on the first ‘shovel’ to ‘dig into the problem’ literally. The content citing statistics are equally compelling. Imagine that the USA has spent 1 Trillion dollars since 1971 to fight drugs and the war continues to only get worse. It leaves you in a bit of shock and awe to see the numbers multiply under ‘Lines of coke smoked in the U.S. while you were reading this’ section. As crazy as it sounds, for a second we contemplated jumping out of the article to make the numbers stop. The story here isn’t created in a standard blog format. It is neither a static infographic. Instead, if forces you to scroll wondering what to expect next. Last, but not the least, it makes an effective call to action (CTA) in favour of the content publisher. You can equate the publisher to not only be an authority on the subject but also as a crusader willing to fight the problem. 2. Face-averaging stories Most people think of themselves to be in an average bracket in life traits. They are average in school, college, at work, in skills and at life in general. This interesting reason propels the ‘average’ mind to check statistics about averages. Using latest technologies, you can average hundreds of facial images to show your readers what an ‘average Joe’ looks like. From criminals to celebrities to successful professionals, you can choose topics that have the inherent quality to go viral because the final picture will be something no one else will have. Want to check out how this works? Try FaceResearch.Org Wondering what the ‘average’ woman looks like? The Daily Mail blended thousands of faces of women from around the world to find the answer. This is what it found: 3. Playing on User Generated Content (UGC) Users love to share content. Sometimes they do it because they’ve either loved or hated your products and service. At other times, they do it for a small incentive. In either case, if you get your hands on a good collection of UGC, you can do more than a simple slide show. Several brands have taken UGC to reinvent their brands, create commercials and generate awareness. Even if you don’t have such agenda, you can still use UGC to create ‘different’ content. The New York Times, for example, created an interesting page featuring user photos of the 2017 solar eclipse as it moved across America. It makes you want to scroll down until the very end to see people’s reactions to the eclipse. In 2012, Ray Ban partnered with Breakfast to use a system that analyses people’s Instagrams as they are taken and builds a large scale mosaic out of them. This time-lapse video of it is quite captivating. 4. Cursor Tracking It is one thing to feel strongly about a particular topic. It is a whole different thing when you compare your feelings with others. Cursor tracking technology allows to track your mouse’s moments and clicks around your computer screen. It can show how people voted or felt about a particular topic or person. A similar technology is already used extensively in creating analytical heat maps. But a slice of this technology can be used in content creation too. From scales to graphs, you can use different ways to check user intent and then showcase how it measures against others who voted. See a cool live
5 Indian Tech Companies mastering the art of Content
Whenever we think of content marketing, the easy and regular industries come to mind. From fashion to beauty, health to entertainment, it is easy to fit in content with such industries. But what happens when it comes to tech companies? Creating products and services for a very specific set of individuals, does content marketing become too niche or difficult for them? On the contrary, Content Marketing is one of the best tools tech companies can use to connect with their target audience. It allows them to stop pushing sales for products and services and instead concentrate on the audience using them. Your audiences are real people who have businesses to run and problems to solve. Your product may be just one cog in the wheel but you if tell them that you understand and support them, they are more likely to lean on you for a tech solution. The other advantage of content for tech companies is that it allows you to break through the clutter. You and a few other competitors may be selling the exact same product at nearly the same price. What you say, how you say it and how you weave the stories of those benefited using your product will make all the difference. Here are five tech companies doing a great job with content. 1. Intuit India Intuit’s accounting software has been a favourite around the world. In India, it is currently targeting small businesses. By allowing businesses to create GST invoices and cloud tracking of all accounting, it has literally allowed people to manage their accounting in a few clicks. The exciting on-going offers of 70% discount and a free trial was just the push needed to get people to try Intuit. If everything is in place, does Intuit need still pull marketing with content? One of the key things Intuit realized early on was that accounting was just one of the many problems faced by their target audience. New entrepreneurs faced common startup challenges. Intuit decided to address these through its blog. From HR policies for startups to applying for a TIN, the blog covered interesting topics from a finance perspective which brought users closer to solving their problems. It improved brand recall, imbibed trust and gave an entry for entrepreneurs to give their software a try! From traffic to leads to conversions, the content ran the length of the sales cycle. 2. SAP Labs India The SAP Labs in India is their biggest research centre outside their German headquarters. Founded in 1998, it has one the earliest R&D centres in Bangalore. It continues to be a leading provider of business software solutions. It was also declared “Hub of the year in the Asia Pacific and Japan” in 2007. It has seen a 100% increase in both revenue and customer acquisition from when it started. SAP has taken a community-centric and inclusive approach towards content. It created an official Community Blogging Channel that allowed members to share theories, strategies, and opinions related to SAP. The community blogging has been structured effectively and guest bloggers who are truly interested need to ‘earn’ their way inside. You start out as a subscriber, become a contributor and once you publish two or more blogs, you get to become an author. 3. Adobe India If you love graphics and colours, you can’t do without Adobe in your professional kit. The company was recently voted among the top IT companies in India for its policies towards reintegrating moms returning after maternity leave with a buddy program. Such actions go a long way in building the company’s reputation. From a content perspective, Adobe India leaves out any hard sell from its blog. Instead, it is a place where the community can go to find solutions to their design problems. From immersive VR experiences to visual trend forecasts, the blog keeps you updated on the future of design. In addition to this, Adobe puts out content on several of its other community platforms like Create Magazine, Behance, and 99u. Each of these addresses a specific community within the design industry and talk to them about creating a better design. The fact that they can do so with Adobe doesn’t need to be said explicitly. 4. Netapp India Netapp is one of India’s leading companies helping clients gain insight, access, and control over their data. Their amazing array of products and solutions for data management and cloud services is effectively helping transform business technology. Netapp’s clients are primarily the tech heads of leading companies so the content they put out on their blog isn’t the fluffy kind but full of technical knowledge. The content completely showcases their core expertise acting as a sales support too. Netapp also nurtures a community of bloggers via the Netapp Community Forum. The authors get ranked by the kudos they receive. This gamification of content ensures that people remain motivated to continually post to quality content to the forum. 5. Teleperformance India Teleperformance is a name synonymous with customer experience. Several companies rely on them to give a seamless customer service experience for their brand. As a company, Teleperformance is raising the bar for employee engagement. They ditched the traditional annual appraisal a couple of years back and started a monthly, real-time score card. With constant feedback, the employees now have a chance to improve their performance on an ongoing basis rather than wait the entire year. Their website has a “Think with us” section, where they not only publish their own insights but of external experts too. This mix of internal and external thought leadership articles not only helps them engage with their clients but also builds strong relationships based on authoritative content. Conclusion The common thread among leading tech companies in India is that they are all very focused on nurturing the community around their products. The realise that the end users are passionate about such products and services. You don’t need a hard sell for such
How to start your first content marketing campaign: the 5 must-do steps
There is a lot of hype and plenty of statistics that suggest that if you aren’t doing content marketing, you are losing out on a big chunk of business. A lot of it is true too. To find out, examine your own online behaviour. How many times have you searched Google to find out answers to your most pressing personal and professional questions? Daily? More than twice daily? We bet. We’ve all gone on to use the information we gather online to make purchase decisions too. In 2016 alone, an estimated 1.61 billion people worldwide purchase goods online. Did you know that content plays a sizable role in pushing up those sales numbers? A report titled ‘How Educational Content Impacts Purchase Power, Brand Affinity and Trust’ gave three important statistics: Consumers who read a brand’s educational content are 131% more likely to purchase from that brand. One week after reading content, customers were still 48% more likely to buy. Reading content greatly increases consumer trust and brand affinity, which increases as time passes. Combine this with the fact that over 80% B2B marketers have planned to use content as a part of their strategic mix this year. If you don’t have content in your 2018 marketing plan, be ready to answer your boss when he asks “Were you living under a rock?”. Content marketing isn’t rocket science (not all of it). Some parts can be implemented swiftly and easily once you set your mind to it. This guide will help you get started. Before you start… There is already a lot of content out there. We neither have the time or the inclination to skim through it all for a particular topic. Instead, we only go for the crème. The average lifespan of a human is 672,000 hours. More than 4x that number of hours worth videos are uploaded to YouTube every day! The one that grabs our attention is the content that is most relevant and easily ‘findable’. This fact gives us the first understanding towards content marketing that if your content isn’t optimized, you’ll be missing out on the results of the marketing campaign. This will form the crux of all content you write including your blogs and website content writing. Step 1: What are your marketing goals? How do you create your content goals out of your marketing goals? Marketing is an overarching term of which content forms a subset. You could be setting your marketing goals on both a quarterly or annual basis. Most marketing goals revolve around generating leads for your business. Other goals like strengthening your brand identity, launching new products and optimizing company communication. Each of these goals can translate into a content goal. Gathering leads: Writing content with a great call-to-action that works as a traffic magnet and aids in generating leads. Brand identity: Using content to ensure more people hear about your brand and engage with you in the long run. Launching new product: Understanding market needs, creating an excitement around the launch and ensuring that your target audience knows about the product. Optimizing company communication: Undertaking customer surveys for feedback, queries, satisfaction ratios, replying to reviews and maintaining online reputation. Step 2: Brainstorming ideas It is one thing to Google topics and starts writing. But the real content game players plan out a strategic campaign with the goal and metrics in mind. This is, by far, the most difficult part of content marketing. The idea of the content should not be to sell your product but around a problem you solve or a way to engage and excite your audience. The fact that your product gets visibility which eventually leads to conversion becomes the high point. Here is an example of three brands that chose the off-beat path for a content campaign that gave them great results. Step 3: Create a content calendar Once you have the overall campaign idea, you’ll need to plan out how it’ll all come together. What info will go on your website? How often will you need to push content and what you can expect from each content piece? Which media will you use to engage with your customers? How long will you run the campaign? How will you capture the leads? And finally, how will you measure the success of campaign at the end of it all. Step 4: Develop your content This can either be super easy or super difficult based on how you handle it. The first option is that you can add this as a task for your in-house team. Depending on their level of expertise, you can map out the content as per your plan. This may not be as simple as it looks it requires both time and expertise to craft content. The second option is to hire someone who does content for their bread, butter and some jam on the side. With the right brief and timeline, the execution of your content plan will go on an auto-pilot, allowing you to only pay attention to the success analytics. Step 5: Measure and iterate The fact that content is good or bad can be very subjective. Sometimes the most well-written content does not deliver what a click-bait can. You’ll need to experiment with different facets of content like video, infographics, white papers and case studies in your content marketing mix to see how each of them fares against the goals you’ve set. If you see a quarter on quarter increase in the goals you’ve set, you are most likely to be on the path to success. If not, you’ll have to iterate to your plan B for the quarter. Either way, you’ll need to quick and agile to be a step ahead of your competition. Conclusion Content marketing does deliver results. There are several success stories on the web on the innovative use of content. See an example of how we used content marketing for Alliance Fintech and increased their traffic
SEO: Optimizing For Voice Search
Three-year-old Jia picked up her mother’s phone, unlocked it, then went on to Google voice search and confidently said, “Pikachu video”. In an instant, several of the popular Pokemon character’s videos popped up on the screen. The world of search just opened up not only to people who don’t want to type but those who can’t. And since search is changing, it is but natural that optimization will have to change too. How much, when and how is what we are about to find out. A lot of technology is about convenience. It works to make our life easy. Search allows us to find and connect with the things we seek out – be it businesses, products, services or just knowledge. From an optimization perspective, things seemed fairly easy a decade back. It meant we use a few keywords in the right places and things pretty much worked. With time, the algorithm grew intelligent enough to weed out those trying to game the system with keywords. And just as we figured that content and good links mattered the most, in came the smartphones which brought the shift to optimizing for mobile. As of today, optimizing for ‘search intent’ seems to be the most important factor in SEO. Historically, the way we optimize has changed when the medium for search changed. So it looks like optimization will undergo another change with voice search growing rapidly. Siri, Cortana, Alexa and now Google’s assistant are leading the way in which we use voice search. In 2015, search using virtual assistants went from zero to 10% of the global search volume. As of today, because the medium is slowly gaining adoption, 58% of adults who use it feel they look ‘tech-savvy’ when using it. Another interesting fact is that 28% of the people surveyed felt that voice search was more accurate than typed search. A Meeker’s report states that, as of May 2016, one in every five searches on Android devices is a voice search. Chinese market leader Baidu estimates that by 2020, 50% of searches will be over voice. Apple’s Siri handles more than 1 billion voice searches per week. Here’s another perspective from Google’s viewpoint who constantly seems to modify itself by intuitively sensing user demand. With people moving away from keywords and more towards search similar to the language we speak, Google focussed on answering the question. In fact, Google is providing a direct answer result on about 19.5 percent of total search engine queries. So, what does all this mean for us as digital marketers? How do we prepare ourselves for the future of search? We cover a lot of ground in this article – from what voice search is to what it can be and how we prepare for it. Let’s get started. What is Google Voice Search? Voice search, like many of Google’s products, saw its origin in the Google labs. Introduced in 2010, it’s raw avatar allowed users to call a phone number. After receiving a recorded prompt of ‘Say your search keywords’, an open webpage would be updated with the results. This wasn’t a user-friendly solution but it gave Google the understanding of the potential of the medium. Today, the voice search feature allows users to tap the microphone, speak a phrase or ask a question and directly be presented with the answers. Are Voice Search Results Different From Typed Results? Yes and no. A lot of results come out similar irrespective of how you search for it but with a few exceptions. If you search for directions to a place on mobile v/s desktop you may see slightly different results. But the differences are set to get widen in the future as the number of voice searches increase. But the fact remains that voice has brought a great degree of convenience to search. Let us put this to a small test We start by conducting a voice search for the query “Aishwarya Rai”, the Miss World 1994 winner and popular Bollywood actress. Google immediately tells us that the Indian actress and model also goes by her married name Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. Now that we’ve established the basics, we probe a little further to see how much Google understands if the question was complex. We asked, “Which was her last movie?”. This confused Google a little and instead gave results on the 2016 movie ‘Her last will’. Hmm… scope for improvement. But a lot of other queries came out fine. We asked, ‘What did she wear for Cannes last year?’ and the assistant said, ‘Check out these photos’ which had a few photos of her on the red carpet. Other simple questions like ‘What is her age?’ and ‘Where was she born?’ were also answered accurately. Here, Google assumed that the ‘her’ we are referring to was still ‘Aishwarya Rai’ and interpreted the search query accordingly. This wouldn’t work in a desktop search. Go Google! Incidentally, Cortana’s top voice search is “Who is Bill Gates?”. I think most people are expecting a joke for the answer. But you get a straight answer there. Instead, if you ask Cortana, “Who is your father?”, you’ll technically get a straight answer too! How is Voice Being Used Actually? So we may not typically be searching for Aishwarya Rai using voice, unless for the fun of it. What are people looking for? Turns out, teens and adults tend to use voice a bit differently. People of all ages generally tend to ask practical questions like asking for directions or checking the time or even “near me” searches. But one-third of the teens tend to use voice search to get help with their homework. The places where voice search was used also differed a bit. Most teens (57%) used it with friends while most adults (36%) used it while watching TV. Other common places to use voice search was in the bathroom, while cooking or exercising. Will Videos Be The Best Way To Capture Voice Search? You’ll notice that many of many
Rounding off 2017: The Year That Was
Here we are with the last post of the year! It’s been an interesting one with so many predictions about content coming true. So here’s our look at the year that was… 12 stories, one from each month of the year that shared an interesting perspective on content January – The Fake News Effect We’ve all been victims of the University of Whatsapp one time or the other when we’ve either believed a fake news that came our way or worse, passed it on to the groups we are a part of. What does fake news mean for those who publish content for a living? It means we will all have to up our game to ensure that our credibility as a content and news source remains intact. We don’t pick sketchy sources for our statistics and do a double take when we quote. If Donald Trump was himself the victim of fake content, then the rest of the world needs to look twice before they believe. February – ‘Alarming Ineffectiveness’ Of Existing Brand Content In a survey involving 300,000 consumers, 1500 brands and 33 countries, 60% said that they felt the content created by brands was ‘poor’, irrelevant and failed to deliver. Should brands follow the 80-20 rule with content – 80% content that engages, inspires, motivates and educates and 20% that talks about the brand or push sale? Things have worked differently for different brands. We do know that brands, for sure, have taken a step back to re-look at their strategy to improve engagement and effectiveness. March – When Google Had To Apologize It is one of those rare times when tables were turned and Google admitted to having made a mistake. It all started when London based Times newspaper ran a story of how ads were showing up next to offensive videos. It resulted in some of Google’s biggest customers like Havas Group U.K. (sixth largest advertising company in the world) pulled its clients off. AT&T, Verizon, and several others quickly followed. Brands raised safety concerns on both Google and Facebook ads and it was the time the internet giants took some action. The news was trickling in throughout the year on the steps that were being taken to make amends. April: Content Marketers Have 3 Days To Generate Brand Recall Your content may be good, but is it memorable? A study conducted by Prezi in partnership with cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Carmen Simon revealed that “80% of consumers forget the majority of information from branded content after only three days, and over half can’t recall a single detail“ But wait, don’t be disheartened. Because the science reveals more. People forget content because it is irrelevant, lacks motivation to remember or is simply too much to retain. If your content doesn’t fall into any of these categories then you are safe. May – The Digiday Content Marketing Award Winners And What We Learned From Them Working in an office? You probably have a printer around you. And it is hacakable! Did you know that less than 2% of business printers are secure? HP’s six-minute video called ‘The Wolf’ shows the serious consequences of a printer hack and reveals that HP has the most secure line of printers. The ad won ‘The best in Show’ at Digiday. We had something to learn from each winner on how they made content work. There’s hope in the world, folks! June – The Inevitable Mid Year Review We’ve seen trend reports published almost every month. The mid-year review isn’t too different but it does give a good view of where you need to converge your energies. For us, it was good to see interactive content marketing featuring in this list. All the rest was pretty much in line with what was already being said. July – B2B Marketers Still Grappling With Content Did you read the headline and feel disheartened? It’s actually an opportunity knocking on our door. We’ve seen that content marketing strategies can be very effective. But only for those who know how to use and measure it. Several in the B2B market are yet to experience this magic because content marketing probably started as a half-hearted effort and dwindled somewhere along the line. It is a perfect opportunity for content creators like us to be the torch bearers and change this statistic over the next year. August – Toronto Startup Launches First AI Based Content Marketing Recommendation Engine That Leverages Visitor Intent We’ve known for a while that AI and machine learning will have an impact on the way we consume content in the future. (We’ve also wondered if our species is set to become extinct in the next decade, thanks to AI). And a part of that future is now our reality. This AI engine will be working to understand your ‘intent’ and present content to you based on your choices. And truly, this is just the beginning. We can imagine a Terminator-style ‘I’ll be back’ from AI only to return with a better version 2 of its intelligent engine. September – The Benchmark Report Though this report took North America as its base, there are some interesting trends in there that apply to the rest of the world. More B2B marketers are allocating budgets and resources to content marketing and a good percentage of them have a documented strategy too. All good stats, especially if you are trying to bag a new B2B client! October – 63% Asset Managers See Content Marketing As Their Most Effective Tool In The Coming Year Annual surveys with heart-pleasing stats like these allow content marketers to make their next year plans and projections with peace of mind knowing that there are many sailing in the same boat. Next year might be the year they will be quoting our case study here? Just about. November – When Content Marketing Increased Website Traffic By 149% Alliance Fintech Case Study – How we used content marketing to spike traffic by 149% from Justwords Consultants