latest news – Page 3

U.S. Media Advertising Outlook Through 2024

PwC’s Entertainment & Media Outlook Report contains projections for U.S. advertising growth through 2024. Following are highlights for major media:

	Digital Out-of-Home Advertising Digital Out-of-Home (ex. billboard, DMV, elevator, gas station) remains strong with a +7.7% compound annual growth rate (CAGR)¹ through 2024. Out-of-home has the strongest forecast of traditional media with a +2.8% CAGR, buoyed almost entirely by digital out-of-home’s growth.
	Online Advertising Online is expected to have a +4.1% CAGR, below forecasts of past years. Mobile online will grow faster at a +6.2% CAGR, with wired forecast to decline at -1.5%.
	Radio Advertising Radio is expected to remain flat with a CAGR of +0.6%. Online radio will be the fastest-growing segment with a +7.1% CAGR.
	Television Advertising TV continues to grow slowly at a +0.4% CAGR, despite a rise in TV viewing. Online TV is also growing slowly at a +3.9% CAGR, below forecasts of past years.
	Cinema Advertising Cinema advertising revenue will decline with a CAGR of -2.2%. Cinema box office takings will not fare any better.
	Magazine Advertising Consumer magazines remain pessimistic with a -4.2% CAGR; digital’s +2.9% is not enough to offset print’s -11.1%. Trade magazines -0.7% CAGR expects digital’s +4.4% to make up for print’s -7.0%.
	Newspaper Advertising Newspapers continue to decline with a -6.3% CAGR. Digital’s CAGR of +1.9% is not growing quickly enough to offset print’s -12.4%.

¹The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is the proportional growth rate from year to year for a business, used to calculate growth over a time period.

Source: PwC’s Entertainment & Media Outlook, reported by Marketingcharts.com

The Importance of Investing in Ongoing Marketing

“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two… basic functions: marketing and innovation. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result… from the customer’s point of view.” — Peter Drucker, leading expert on management theory

Successful businesses never stop marketing. Marketing is the regular, sustained nourishment that gets your business where you want it and keeps it there. Following are four reasons why thriving businesses engage in vigorous, ongoing marketing efforts:

ONGOING MARKETING:

Protects your reputation:

Your business is always improving, yet people’s perceptions tend to remain fixed and may be out of sync.
It takes time to define/shape your reputation and you need to be doing it continuously, keeping customers up to date.

Shapes your customer base:

As your business evolves, target different audiences: your focus may change only slightly or it may expand to a new customer base.
Constantly evaluate your target and adjust your messaging, visuals, and strategy accordingly.

Gives you many options:

Having “just enough” business isn’t enough; with active marketing, there should be more demand than you can meet.
This allows you to properly select your customers, focusing on the most profitable ones, and have a waiting list ready for slower times.

Secures your business’s future:

Marketing creates and strengthens business.
Don’t leave your future up to chance — plant seeds now that will harvest next season.

Viability – lots of work, happy customers, a busy staff – is a key milestone in the life of a business. This is the beginning, not the end, of your journey and marketing will be your constant companion every step of the way.

Source: Posted by James Archer, crowdfavorite.com

How to Use Emotion to Elevate Your Marketing

“Humans are driven by feelings. So if you want the consumer to remember your product or brand, they must be engaged and impassioned by the interaction with your company.”

– Logan Chierotti, Inc.

People buy emotions, not products/services: up to 80% of consumers’ decisions are fueled by emotion, not logic (1), so to compete, marketers must appeal to consumers’ feelings.

Following are insights into why and how businesses should use emotions to optimize their marketing strategies.

Research Reveals that Emotions Influence Consumer Decision Making:

Consumers primarily use emotions (personal feelings and experiences), rather than information (brand attributes, features, and facts), when evaluating brands (2).
Consumers’ emotional response to an ad has a greater influence on their intent to make a purchase than does the ad’s content.
Likeability is the measure most predictive of whether an ad will increase sales (3).
Positive emotions have a greater impact on consumer loyalty than trust and other judgments, which are based
on a brand’s attributes.

Important Components of a Brand have Emotional Dimensions:

Rich and powerful representations of a brand include its personality.
Brand personality is communicated through packaging, visual imagery, and specific words used to describe products/services.
A brand’s emotions are found in its narrative – the story that communicates who it is, what it means to the consumer, and why the consumer should care – and is the basis for brand advertising and promotion.
Most importantly, emotions push consumers toward action.

Use Data to Prioritize the Emotional Needs of Consumers:

Lean on data to learn what customers search for and to understand their emotional needs.
Dig into common emotional motivators, which are the feelings that drive customers’ behavior (4).
Emotional motivators provide a better gauge of a customer’s future value to a business than any other metric, including brand awareness and customer satisfaction.
In your search efforts, maintain the brand voice and feeling that you channel in your advertising, so that customers have a consistent experience with you, producing a consistent emotion.

An understanding of consumer purchase behavior should be based on knowledge of human emotion and include the paramount influence that they have on decision-making. Businesses that successfully appeal to emotions have reaped considerable rewards.

Source: Yext.com, reported by Jaime Netzer; ONWARD19; 1 Psychology Today; SocialMediaToday, by Bryan Kramer; 2 Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); 3 Advertising Research Foundation (ARF); 4 Harvard Business Review

Creating a Strong Brand Positioning Statement

Branding plays an essential role in a business’ development: studies show consistent brand presentation increases revenue up to 23%*. Each piece of content – ads, website, social media, etc. – should communicate your business’ core values. Following are steps to ensure your marketing efforts are aligned with your brand:

Define the Core Elements of Strategic Market Positioning

Target Market: Define and target your ideal customer so that your message resonates.
Market Category: Determine your competition and how to position your brand against them.
Customer Concerns: Address customers’ issues and provide a solution.
Brand Promise: Outline what consumers will gain from using your product/service.
Mission: Establish your approach, objectives and goals.
Brand Identity/Values: Execute the personality of your business, both visible (e.g. logo, design, etc.) and less visible (e.g. values, voice, etc.), to set you apart and gain recognition.

Create a Positioning Statement

A positioning statement is an internal tool used to align your marketing efforts, and describes how your product/service fills a need of your target market. It emphasizes your brand’s identity, purpose, and distinguishing features:
- Who you serve
- What you offer them
- How you offer it
- Why you do what you do
- How this compares to what’s already out there

Tips for Writing a Positioning Statement

Keep it brief, concise and to the point, aiming for no more than five sentences.
Make it unique and memorable, highlighting the distinctive qualities of your brand.
Remain true to your brand and reflect your business’ core values.
State who your customers are and how you help them.
Communicate how your business differs from the competition.
Keep it clear for use as a guideline to ensure that your business decisions align with your brand.

Your positioning statement should provide room for growth as your business matures and products/services change. Be sure to consistently market your brand and develop an ongoing message across all platforms.

Source: Meredith Hart, Hubspot.com; *lucidpress.com

The Importance of Video Marketing

Video is a versatile and engaging content format that provides pictures which are entertaining, engaging and easy to share across multiple platforms. Following are four key reasons why video is crucial for your marketing strategy, along with tips for best practices.

Video is one of the best ways to get close to your audience and give them a glimpse of your business.

1) Informing and Educating

Over 95% of marketers claim that videos help customers understand products.¹
Videos excel at giving customers a close look at a product/service.

2) Search Engine Optimization

It is projected that over 80% of all traffic will consist of video.²
Search engines love videos because of their high-quality content: optimize videos with the right keywords, a solid meta description* and a strong title.

3) Staying Competitive

Just over 80% of businesses use video for marketing.¹
By using storytelling and unique types of media, you can catch, and hold, people’s attention.

4) Boosting Conversions

Ninety percent of consumers claim a video helps them make a purchasing decision³ and video boosts conversion rates** by 80%⁴.
Videos keep people around long enough to continue looking on the site: consumers watching video stay two minutes longer and are 64% more likely to make a purchase⁵.

5) Tips for Best Practices

Boost your SEO: use captions for autoplay, incorporate call-to-action***, keep the video on silent if it’s on a landing page and ensure your video is mobile friendly.
Organize a library of videos on YouTube and incorporate them into various forms of content such as blogs and emails.

Video is one of the best ways to get close to your audience and give them a glimpse of your business. Think beyond profit and product: share your philosophy, provide news on an interesting event, or offer valuable information. The more they know about your positive practices, the more likely customers will remain loyal to your business.

*Meta description: an HTML element that summarizes the contents of your page for the benefit of users and search engines (wordstream.com).

**Conversion rate: the number of conversions divided by the number of visitors (e.g., if a site receives 200 visitors in a month and has 50 sales, the conversion rate would be 50 divided by 200, or 25%) (optimizely.com).

***Call to action: a prompt on a website that tells the user to take some specified action, typically written as a command or action phrase, such as ‘Sign Up’ or ‘Buy Now’ and generally takes the form of a button or hyperlink (optimizely.com).

Source: digitalmarketinginstitute.com; ¹Hubspot; ²Cisco; ³Social Media Today; ⁴Wyzowl; ⁵Comscore

What do Consumers Pay Attention to When Judging a Local Business by its Reviews?

A recent study shows that online reviews for local businesses are the norm for many consumers: 82% report reading reviews and over 90% say that a positive review makes them more likely to use a business.

Reviews have a vital impact on the behavior of local consumers.

Following are key findings:

Recency:
Recency of reviews impacts consumers’ decisions:

Nearly 3 in 5 consumers judge a review by how recent it is.
Almost half say a review should be within two weeks of when they view it in order to impact their decision, while one-fifth say it can be as recent as one month.

Star Ratings:
Consumers consider a minimum number of stars before using a business:

The majority of consumers pay attention to overall star ratings.
Seventy percent say a business should have either 3 or 4 stars, 53% would consider 3 stars or less, and 12% insist on a 5-star rating.

Quantity:
The quantity of reviews influences consumers’ trust:

Half of consumers pay attention to the quantity of reviews.
Consumers read an average of ten reviews before trusting a business.

Posting Reviews:
Consumers are more likely to post positive reviews:

Three-fifths left a review for a local business after having a positive experience.
Only 25% say they left a review after a negative experience.

Reading Responses to Reviews:
Consumers place value on businesses that respond to reviews:

Just over 70% of consumers are more likely to use a business that responds to existing reviews.
Businesses should respond promptly, politely and helpfully to both positive and negative reviews.

Reviews can have a vital impact on the behavior of local consumers–an online reputation strongly affects whether customers choose to use a business.

Source: The Local Consumer Review Survey-BrightLocal.com, reported by MarketingCharts.com

Ready to Reopen: Marketing and SEO Strategies for Small Businesses

Reopening and adjusting to the “new normal” will involve researching, communicating and executing plans to pivoting strategically. Following are steps small businesses can take:

Lay Out Your Marketing Strategy

Update your marketing strategy to reflect your customers’ current needs:

• Assess how your competitors are handling marketing and gauge how customers are reacting.

• Address the current reality your customers are facing.

• Communicate important reopening announcements, changes and information.

• Stay on top of your website, blog, email lists, social media channels, etc., to deliver consistent messages about your business plans.

Strengthen SEO Strategies

Clean up areas of your site and prioritize initiatives:

• In-Depth Technical Site Audit: Tackle technical issues with your site.

• Site Migrations and Redesigns: Although it takes time to recover search traffic/rankings while Google indexes your “new” pages, it puts you in a great position with a new, improved site.

• Site Speed Improvements: Improving site speed is a well-known ranking factor and is even more important in the mobile-first indexing era.

• Site Tools, Features, and Functionality: Focus on projects — improve ecommerce functionality, enhance design, etc. — which will pay dividends in the future.

Be prepared with new content:

• Customer Support and FAQ Content: Assess how your business appears in search results and ensure that your content satisfies the immediate needs of customers.

• Warranties, Return Policies and Protection Plans: Create content explaining how customers are protected – consider adding a section to your return policy addressing COVID-19.

• Safety and Cleanliness: Update your business practices in response to the new normal and educate your customers on how you’re keeping them safe.

• Fill Your Site’s Content Gaps: Address content gaps on your site and fill them.

Remain cohesive and stay aligned:

• Daily Standups for Your Team: Meet for 15 minutes each day to discuss what you finished yesterday, today’s priorities, and what may be blocking progress.

• Stay on Track with Your Content Calendar: Keep on track with an updated content calendar.

• Daily Tracking on New Content: Track metrics of new content to make sure it is gaining traction.

• Monitor COVID-19 Content from Your Competitors: Track the new terms related to COVID-19 and the market share for those keywords to stay one step ahead of competitors.

Small businesses need to plan and understand changes to be made and any new growth opportunities that may exist in a post-pandemic world.

Source: USChamber.com, Nicole Fallon; conductor.com, Joe Taylor

Mastering Google My Business Means More Sales

97% of people learn more about a local company online than anywhere else.

With the vast majority* of people using online to learn more about a local company, it’s not surprising that 18% of local mobile searches (mainly using Google) lead to a sale within one day.¹ As a result, it’s important your business is easy to find online. Google My Business (GMB) is a local business listing platform that enables you to do so.

Following are tips for using this important tool:

Claim Your Google My Business Listing

Create a profile from scratch or claim a business that’s already on GMB’s list.
Update your page and verify your business with a code Google will send to your business address.

Include All the Essential Info

Choose a category (from over 2,000 available), name, address and other essential information.
Add a description with relevant keywords and attributes that will attract customers.

Upload Quality Images

Add images of your storefront and/or team to help build a rapport and entice people to visit.
Ensure the images are high quality and show your business in a positive light.

Attract Visitors to Your Page; Garner Positive Reviews

Reviews affect your SEO**: GMB reviews with relevant keywords were the second most influential factor in rankings for local searches².
Include signage in your store/business, add a link to review your business in your email signature and/or share positive reviews on your social media pages.

Respond to All Reviews

Respond to all reviews on an ongoing basis, showing consumers that you’re responsive.
By providing a satisfactory response, customers may leave a more favorable review than they did initially.

Post Content Continuously

Google Posts enables GMB account owners to post content directly into the search engine results page.³
Keep your listing fresh by sharing content continuously, including special offers, blog posts, events, photos, videos, etc.

“One solid way to attract visitors to your website and to your business … is by having an optimized Google My Business page.” – Seth Rand, Founder/CEO of Rand Marketing

*97% of people learn more about a local company online than anywhere else.

**SEO is a set of practices used for optimizing a website’s content, structure, and other integral parts with the goal of manipulating search engines’ result pages. (SEO Tribunal)

Source: smallbiztrends.com, reported by Annie Pilon;

¹A study from Glo-Globe; (moz.com);

²A study from Local SEO Guide;

³hallaminternet.com

Out-Of-Home Ad Forecast Sees Sharp Gain In 2020

Both U.S. and global Out-of-Home (OOH) ad growth is expected to rise at a fast pace in 2020, with U.S. Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) increasing even more rapidly.

Out-of-Home Ad Growth:

Global: Out-of-Home is expected to see an 8.5% growth in 2020, the fastest increase in 13 years, and will continue to ramp up until 2023.
U.S.: Out-of-Home’s compounded annual growth rate (CAGR)* will be 5.4% from 2018 through 2023.

U.S. Digital Out-of-Home Ad Growth:

In the U.S., Digital Out-of-Home (ex. billboard, DMV, elevator, gas station) will rise even more rapidly at an 8.5% CAGR from 2018 through 2023.
In 2023, DOOH will have a 38.3% share of all Out-of-Home media in the U.S.

U.S. Consumer Exposure:

U.S. consumer exposure to OOH advertising is expected to rise 1% to 2.96 hours per week through 2023.
DOOH consumer exposure will rise at a 5.1% compounded rate to reach 1.23 hours by 2023.

*The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is the proportional growth rate from year to year, used to calculate growth over a time period.

Source: MediaDailyNews, reported by Wayne Friedman

What is Your SEO Strategy for 2020?

“The future of the industry lies in understanding the customer’s intent.” –thinkwithgoogle.com

With the rise of voice assistants, chatbots, and conversational search, the customer journey more often starts with a question, a desire, a need, and AI-powered¹ discovery services (ex. search engines, apps, maps, etc.) are responding with more relevant, detailed information. With this shift in consumer search behavior, following are insights for SEO² (Search Engine Optimization) strategies:

IF THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY STARTS WITH A QUESTION: HOW DO MARKETERS ANSWER?

To ensure your business appears in search results as the answer to your customers’ questions, manage your brand data, which is made up of hundreds of facts, concepts, and details about your products/services.
The ideal architecture for AI-powered search and discovery services emerging today is to consolidate brand information in a single location. It must be accessible and structured to align to the changing digital ecosystem.

THE NEW CUSTOMER JOURNEY

Search engines are retraining consumers to ask instead of search; the customer journey starts with a question, which leads to new, different questions as a part of the research process
Google search results pages include a feature that shows what “people also ask”, with a set of questions to click on for answers, and to click through for a full search.

QUESTIONS ARE THE NEW KEYWORDS

To keep up with the shift from keywords to questions, marketers must structure their brand data to provide direct answers, on and off the brand website.
Question = Search = Intent: search marketing has moved beyond keywords to searcher’s intentions, and consumers’ questions state exactly what they want.

UNDERSTANDING INTENT ALONG THE JOURNEY

To understand the customer’s journey and what’s important to them, examine their searches and the questions they asked.
Map the journey by looking at when those questions were asked, and strategize to meet similar customers along the way.

BUILDING AN INTENT MODEL

Build an intent model, which creates the basis to answer consumers’ questions, and identifies which search terms to target to get the best return for your customers.
The goal is to understand and optimize marketing strategies for the customer’s path of intent.

DEMOGRAPHIC VS. INTENT MARKETING

Demographic targeting studies who your customers are, but not what they do or how they feel. Relying only on demographics to reach consumers risks missing more than 70% of potential mobile shoppers.
Research customers’ intent based on signals of interest in a product/service. Intent marketing is more effective at reaching and converting customers, and is reactive to their stated needs and raises fewer privacy concerns.

The customer journey starts with a question, and consumers expect answers. Provide accurate, consistent, brand-verified answers to consumer questions, no matter where or how customers are searching.

¹Artificial intelligence (AI): the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems (searchenterpriseai.techtarget.com). ²SEO (Search Engine Optimization): the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through search engine results (moz.com).

Source: Marc Ferrentino, Chief Strategy Officer at Yext; thinkwithgoogle.com; how-to-build-buyer-intent-model

PwC’s Entertainment & Media Outlook Report contains projections for U.S. advertising growth through 2024. Following are highlights for major media:

Digital Out-of-Home Advertising

Digital Out-of-Home (ex. billboard, DMV, elevator, gas station) remains strong with a +7.7% compound annual growth rate (CAGR)¹ through 2024.

Out-of-home has the strongest forecast of traditional media with a +2.8% CAGR, buoyed almost entirely by digital out-of-home’s growth.

Online Advertising

Online is expected to have a +4.1% CAGR, below forecasts of past years.

Mobile online will grow faster at a +6.2% CAGR, with wired forecast to decline at -1.5%.

Radio Advertising

Radio is expected to remain flat with a CAGR of +0.6%.

Online radio will be the fastest-growing segment with a +7.1% CAGR.

Television Advertising

TV continues to grow slowly at a +0.4% CAGR, despite a rise in TV viewing.

Online TV is also growing slowly at a +3.9% CAGR, below forecasts of past years.

Cinema Advertising

Cinema advertising revenue will decline with a CAGR of -2.2%.

Cinema box office takings will not fare any better.

Magazine Advertising

Consumer magazines remain pessimistic with a -4.2% CAGR; digital’s +2.9% is not enough to offset print’s -11.1%.

Trade magazines -0.7% CAGR expects digital’s +4.4% to make up for print’s -7.0%.

Newspaper Advertising

Newspapers continue to decline with a -6.3% CAGR.

Digital’s CAGR of +1.9% is not growing quickly enough to offset print’s -12.4%.

¹The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is the proportional growth rate from year to year for a business, used to calculate growth over a time period.

Source: PwC’s Entertainment & Media Outlook, reported by Marketingcharts.com

“Humans are driven by feelings. So if you want the consumer to remember your product or brand, they must be engaged and impassioned by the interaction with your company.”

– Logan Chierotti, Inc.

People buy emotions, not products/services: up to 80% of consumers’ decisions are fueled by emotion, not logic (1), so to compete, marketers must appeal to consumers’ feelings.

Following are insights into why and how businesses should use emotions to optimize their marketing strategies.

Research Reveals that Emotions Influence Consumer Decision Making:

Consumers primarily use emotions (personal feelings and experiences), rather than information (brand attributes, features, and facts), when evaluating brands (2).

Consumers’ emotional response to an ad has a greater influence on their intent to make a purchase than does the ad’s content.

Likeability is the measure most predictive of whether an ad will increase sales (3).

Positive emotions have a greater impact on consumer loyalty than trust and other judgments, which are based on a brand’s attributes.

Important Components of a Brand have Emotional Dimensions:

Rich and powerful representations of a brand include its personality.

Brand personality is communicated through packaging, visual imagery, and specific words used to describe products/services.

A brand’s emotions are found in its narrative – the story that communicates who it is, what it means to the consumer, and why the consumer should care – and is the basis for brand advertising and promotion.

Most importantly, emotions push consumers toward action.

Use Data to Prioritize the Emotional Needs of Consumers:

Lean on data to learn what customers search for and to understand their emotional needs.

Dig into common emotional motivators, which are the feelings that drive customers’ behavior (4).

Emotional motivators provide a better gauge of a customer’s future value to a business than any other metric, including brand awareness and customer satisfaction.

In your search efforts, maintain the brand voice and feeling that you channel in your advertising, so that customers have a consistent experience with you, producing a consistent emotion.

An understanding of consumer purchase behavior should be based on knowledge of human emotion and include the paramount influence that they have on decision-making. Businesses that successfully appeal to emotions have reaped considerable rewards.

Source: Yext.com, reported by Jaime Netzer; ONWARD19; 1 Psychology Today; SocialMediaToday, by Bryan Kramer; 2 Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); 3 Advertising Research Foundation (ARF); 4 Harvard Business Review

Define the Core Elements of Strategic Market Positioning

Target Market: Define and target your ideal customer so that your message resonates.

Market Category: Determine your competition and how to position your brand against them.

Customer Concerns: Address customers’ issues and provide a solution.

Brand Promise: Outline what consumers will gain from using your product/service.

Mission: Establish your approach, objectives and goals.

Brand Identity/Values: Execute the personality of your business, both visible (e.g. logo, design, etc.) and less visible (e.g. values, voice, etc.), to set you apart and gain recognition.

Create a Positioning Statement

A positioning statement is an internal tool used to align your marketing efforts, and describes how your product/service fills a need of your target market. It emphasizes your brand’s identity, purpose, and distinguishing features:

Who you serve

What you offer them

How you offer it

Why you do what you do

How this compares to what’s already out there

Tips for Writing a Positioning Statement

Keep it brief, concise and to the point, aiming for no more than five sentences.

Make it unique and memorable, highlighting the distinctive qualities of your brand.

Remain true to your brand and reflect your business’ core values.

State who your customers are and how you help them.

Communicate how your business differs from the competition.

Keep it clear for use as a guideline to ensure that your business decisions align with your brand.