Marketing, Startups, and Venture Capital
Drew is a data-driven marketer with a passion for crafting exceptional brand experiences. He currently runs marketing at High Alpha, an Indianapolis-based venture studio, and previously held roles in content marketing and product marketing at ExactTarget and Salesforce. At High Alpha, Drew advises and runs marketing in the early days for the High Alpha Studio portfolio companies, helping them scale to their first $1M in revenue and build world-class marketing teams.
On Tuesday, Apple held a special event out in Cupertino where they made major announcements and unveiled the latest additions to their product line for the 2014 holiday season.
Read MoreYesterday Instagram announced a “new suite of business tools for brands” that will be rolled out over the next weeks and months. The suite included long-needed tools for account insights, advertising insights, and ad development. They also announced the rollout of these tools and Instagram ads for all Instagram brands in the coming future, not just their original launch brands.
Instagram, now a “community of more than 200 million worldwide”, is quickly becoming a powerful platform for businesses. There were some of the first to jump on Instagram videos—a study late in 2013 found that 40% of the top 1,000 most popular Instagram videos were from brands.
Read MoreIf you’re going to invest time in social media, you need to measure performance, but it can be difficult to identify relevant metrics. There’s no one-size-fits-all method of measuring social media success because goals vary from brand to brand. But you can certainly find ways to measure all the work you’re putting into your social presence.
Finding and mastering the key performance indicators (KPIs) for your digital marketing efforts is a top priority for marketers. Social media marketing comes under scrutiny often for its effectiveness and performance. It’s important to know how you’re measuring performance and mastering the metrics that matter.
Check out the infographic below and our latest e-book, 5 Steps to Effective Social Media Measurement, that will give you practical applications to help you:
Developing an effective measurement strategy requires relevant data and the flexibility to tweak your tactics. There is no universal way to measure every social media initiative, but these calculations are at your disposal. Choose wisely and don’t overwhelm yourself. It’s up to you to choose what to track.
For more details on how to effectively measure you social media performance, download the full guide, 5 Steps to Effective Social Media Measurement, here.
Last week’s Google I/O 2014 developer conference left many developers swooning. With typical tech keynote fashion, product announcements, feature enhancements, a new operating system, new developer programs, and much more were all packed into a two-and-a-half-hour keynote—the full recording can be found at the bottom of this post for any Google enthusiasts out there with a free three hours.
There have been many recaps and articles on the news from the conference, but I wanted to call out some of the big news specifically for marketers and the impact Google's announcements will have on your future marketing plans. Below, is my recap of the keynote and conference along with the major takeaways for marketers.
Read MoreFrom Most presentations aren't bullet proof by Seth Godin:
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- Bullets do not save time. Memos save time. Presentations aren't about the most concise exposition of facts, they are about changing minds.
- Bullets are actually aggressive, they're gotchas lying in wait to be brought up later, either by an observer calling you out or a presenter reminding us he told us so.
- Bullets do not make it easier to remember what's being said.
- Bullets create tension about what the next bullet is going to say, instead of actually communicating your idea. When we see a bullet, we check it off and stop paying attention until the next one appears.
Last week IPG Media Lab released a new report on messaging apps and how brands are experimenting with marketing campaigns on these new platforms.
Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp for $19 billion brought significant coverage for the mobile messaging app industry as a whole. Ever since, brands and marketers have been asking what value these new apps and platforms could have for marketing purposes.
IPG's whitepaper explores their predictions for the future of app messaging and gives some case study examples and best practices for brands to understand how to utilize these new platforms.
Below are a few of the major messaging platforms and how brands have already begun to use each platform:
Kik
The IPG Media Lab launched their own campaign on Kik with One Direction to build an exclusive user community for One Direction fans using Kik cards. They created an exclusive community where fans could chat and connect while encouraging purchases with exclusive rewards.
Line
The Japanese messaging app giant, Line, offers a vast array of voice, messaging, and gaming services for its users. Paul McCartney has started to experiment with Line's popular "stickers," releasing eight exclusive stickers for sale on the platform through his Line account.
Snapchat
Snapchat has gained quite a bit more popularity and press here in the United States with its limited-time "Snaps." A few brands have already started to experiment with Snapchat. The Philadelphia Eagles used Snapchat to send behind-the-scenes photos and videos and release announcements and news to fans.
WeChat
WeChat, which is largely used in China, is being used in numerous ways by major brands. After partnering with mobile payments provider Tenpay to allow users to make purchases within the app, McDonald's used this partnership to offer discounts on items purchased upfront through the app.
McDonald's also has launched campaigns using WeChat's voice capabilities. They launched a contest asking users to record and submit a "Big Mac Rap" in the style of a Chinese TV personality.
PepsiCo has also used WeChat's voice capabilities to launch similar campaigns.
One of the key differences for marketers beginning to use messaging apps in their marketing programs will be the private nature of these apps. The essence of these apps is built around private messaging. Brands must keep in mind this conversational and personal nature of these apps.
These mobile messaging apps began as a way to avoid texting charges by distributing messages over IP, but these apps have become much more than simply an alternative to SMS. Many analysts in the industry believe a much larger trend is arising as these messaging apps are becoming major platforms in and of themselves. In-line messaging will soon be an integral part of brands' mobile marketing campaigns.
From Cracking the pottery by Seth Godin:
Read MoreI find that it's almost essential to fall in love with an idea to invest the time it takes to make it good and worth sharing. And then, the hard part: deleting that idea when it's just not what it could be. Too often, organizations are good at the first part, but struggle with the second. And so we defend expired business models, support the status quo and have a knee-jerk inclination to preserve what we've got.
The size of customer segments is shrinking to one.
As I've said before, the future of marketing and advertising will be personalized, relevant experiences.
Read MoreI recently found this quote from Brian Wong, Founder and CEO of Kiip:
Read MoreThe future of companies in the advertising space shouldn’t be about the number of clicks—it’s about changing how the brand is involved in the consumer’s life. There’s an obsession with the old metrics used to define success, like reach and frequency. In the old model, the number of times a users sees something is when the brand wins.
Just before Mobile World Congress, Facebook entered into an agreement to purchase WhatsApp for about $19 billion.
Many in the startup world started questioning the value for 32 engineers and 450 million monthly active users, but the truth is that this purchase just solidified one of the largest trends in internet history - mobile will soon overtake the desktop web, not only in usage and time, but on a platform level.
Read MoreLast week Google announced an update to the Android platform built specifically for wearables called Android Wear.
A number of vendors have already announced they will be developing smartwatches on the platform, including Motorola's below.
Read MoreApple's release of the iPhone 5S, 5C, and the iPad Air really got me thinking about their position in the marketplace and their product innovation. Apple hasn't had had a significant technological advance that actually surprised consumers and the industry since Siri. Only a few years ago Apple was literally defining the mobile computing industry. Every move they made left the entire industry scrambling. But now, they give us 5 different sizes of the iPad and a fingerprint scanner. Apple is starting to look like Samsung who can't even decide on a good phone size.
Some of you will think I've really lost my marbles in saying this, but I would argue that Apple is no longer on the leading edge of innovation and could soon no longer be the market leader.
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